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BY RANDOLPH BOURNE 

UNTIMELY 
PAPERS 

FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR 

JAMES OPPENHEIM 




NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXIX 



COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY B. W. HUEBSCH 
PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



.B5-79 



APR 24 1320 



©CI.A565667 



EDITOR'S FOREWORD 

Van Wyck Brooks has said of Randolph Bourne 
that he was the very type of that proletarian-aris- 
tocrat which is coming into being. When Brooks 
and Waldo Frank and Louis Untermeyer and 
Paul Rosenfeld and I — a nucleus at the heart of 
a group including so many of the "younger gen- 
eration" — were joyfully publishing The Seven 
Arts we inevitably found the phrase "the young 
world," and by this phrase we characterized noth- 
ing local, but a new international life, an inter- 
weaving of groups in all countries, the unspoiled 
forces everywhere who share the same culture and 
somewhat the same new vision of the world. 
There was in it the Russian mixture of art and 
revolution, the one a change in the spirit of man, 
the other a change in his organized life. 

At first Randolph Bourne was separated from 
us. He had not yet ended his apprenticeship to 

[5] 



that "liberal pragmatism" which he effectually de- 
stroys in "Twilight of Idols." He was still rely- 
ing on the intellect as a programme-maker for so- 
ciety. | But when America entered the war, his ap- 
prenticeship ended. That shock set him free, and 
it was inevitable then that he should not only join 
The Seven Arts but actually in himself gather us 
all together, himself, in America, the very soul of 
"the young world." No nerve of that world was 
missing in him : he was as sensitive to art as to phil- 
osophy, as politically-minded as he was psycho- 
logic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious 
objector as he was in opposing current American 
culture. He was a flaming rebel against our 
crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the 
long struggle with his own body. And just as that 
weak child's body finally slew him before he had 
fully triumphed, so the great war succeeded in 
silencing him. 'When Randolph Bourne died on 
December 22, 1918, all of us of the "younger gen- 
eration" felt that a great man had died with a 
great work unfinished^ 

He had been quite silent for over a year, for 
The Seven Arts was suspended in September, 
[6] 



191 7 j i ts subsidy withdrawn because of our atti- 
tude on the war. He was nowhere wanted. It 
was difficult even for him to get publication for 
book reviews. Backed only by a few friends, he 
held a solitary way, with hardly the heart for new 
enterprise. Nevertheless he began a book, "The 
State," in which he planned the complete expres- 
sion of his attitude, both destructive and creative. 
This was never finished. / We have only what 
amounts to an essay ; but undoubtedly this essay is 
the most effective and terrible indictment of the 
institution of the State which the war has yet 
brought forth. It furnishes a natural climax to 
The Seven Arts essays; together they make a book, 
both historic and prophetic. 

/We have nothing else like this book in Amer- 
ica. It is the only living record of the suppressed 
minority, and is, as so often the case, the prophecy 
of that minority's final triumph. Everything that 
Bourne wrote over two years ago has been vindi- 
cated by the event. A great chorus takes up now 
the song of this solitary, and like so many pioneers 
he has not lived to see his truth made into fact). 

This book is but the first of several. We shall 

[7] 



have, under Van Wyck Brooks's editorship, his 
volume of cultural essays, his reviews, and a "Life 
and Letters." [when the complete picture of 
Randolph Bourne emerges he will be seen as the 
pioneer spirit of his age, a symbol of our future. 
His place in the American tradition is secure. 
His life marks the beginning of our "coming-of- 



lis book relates to the war and the present 
crisis of the world. It does a great service for our 
country. Without it our showing would be weak 
and impoverished compared with the Older Na- 
tions. We may rejoice that as England had her 
Bertrand Russell, France her Roll and and Bar- 
busse, Germany her Liebknecht and Nicolai, so 
America had her Randolph Bourne. 



[8] 



CONTENTS 

Editor's Foreword, 5 
I — Old Tyrannies, 11 
II— The War and the Intellectuals, 22 
III — Below the Battle, 47 
IV — The Collapse of American Strategy, 61 
V— A War Diary, 90 
VI — Twilight of Idols, 1 14 
VII— Unfinished Fragment on the State, 140 



OLD TYRANNIES 

(A Fragment, written in 1918.) 

When you come as an inhabitant to this earth, 
you do not have the pleasure of choosing your 
dwelling, or your career. You do not even have 
the privilege like those poor little shivering souls 
in "The Blue Bird," of sitting about, all aware and 
wondering, while you are chosen, one by one to 
take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a 
helpless victim of your parents' coming together. 
There is denied you even the satisfaction of know- 
ing that they created you, in their own bungling 
fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of 
what they imagined an adequate child should be. 
On the contrary, you may be merely an accident, 
unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life 
of your mother, a drain upon the resources that 

[11] 



were none too great already. And your parents 
have not only not conceived you as a work of art, 
but they are wholly incapable after you are born of 
bringing you up like a work of art. 

The last indignity perhaps is that of being born 
unconscious, like a drugged girl who wakes up 
naked in a bed, not knowing how she got there. 
For by the time you do dimly begin to apprehend 
your relation to things and an intelligible world 
begins to clarify out of the buzz and the darting 
lights and dull sensations, you are lost, a prisoner 
of your surroundings inextricably tangled up with 
your mother's soul and all the intimate things 
around you. Your affections have gotten away 
from your control and attached themselves to 
things that you in later life discover you never in- 
tended them to touch. You depend for comfort 
on attitudes of your mother or father or nurse or 
brothers and sisters, that may be taken away from 
you, leaving you shivering and forlorn. Your 
impulses have had no intuition of reality. They 
have leaped forth blindly and have recoiled 
against or been satisfied with things of which you 
did not have the choosing, and which only very 
[12] 



partially seem to concern themselves with your 
desires. For a few years, with infinite tribula- 
tion, you have to dodge and butt and back your 
way through the little world of other people and 
things that surround you, until you are a little 
worn down to its shape and are able to predict its 
reactions. 

Everything about you is given, ready, consti- 
tuted, rigid, set up when you arrive. You al- 
ways think that some day you are going to catch 
up to this givenness, that you will dominate in- 
stead of falling in line. Fortunate you are if 
you ever come to dominate! Usually as your 
world broadens out more and more around you, 
you merely find a tougher resistance to your de- 
sires. Your world at home is simple, personal, 
appealed to by all sorts of personal manifesta- 
tions. You can express intense resentment and 
affect it, or you can express intense joy and af- 
fect it. Mother and father have an invincible 
strength over your feebleness, but your very 
feebleness is a weapon to break their harsh domi- 
nation. Their defenses melt against your scream 
or your chuckle. As you grow older you become 

[13] 



stronger to manipulate the world. But just in 
proportion does the world become stronger to 
manipulate you. It is no longer susceptible to 
your scream or your smile. You must use less 
personal instruments. But that requires subtlety 
and knowledge. You have still painfully to fer- 
ret out the ways of this world, and learn how to 
use all sorts of unsuspected tools to gain your 
ends. 

For there stands your old world, wary, wily, 
parrying easily all your childish blows, and beat- 
ing you down to your knees, so that you must go 
back and learn your long apprenticeship. By the 
time you have learned it, and have become mas- 
ter, behold! your life is inextricably knotted into 
it. As you learned your apprenticeship, you did 
as the world did, you learned the tricks in order 
that you might get your revenge on this world 
and dominate it as it has tantalizingly held you 
off and subjugated you. But by the time you 
have learned, are you not yourself firmly estab- 
lished as a part of the world yourself, so that you 
dominate nothing. Rather are you now a part of 
that very flaming rampart against which new 

[h] 



youth advances. You cannot help being a part 
of that very rampart without extinguishing your 
own existence. 

So you have never overtaken the given. Ac- 
tually you have fallen farther and farther behind 
it. You have not affected the world you live in; 
you have been molded and shaped by it your- 
self. Your moral responsibility has been a myth, 
for you were never really free enough to have any 
responsibility. While you thought you were 
making headway, you were really being devoured. 
And your children are as casually begotten as you 
were, and born into a world as tight and inelastic 
as was yours. You have a picture of great things 
achieved, but Time laughs his ironical laugh and 
rolls you in the dust. 

You would perhaps the more easily become free 
and strong if you could choose your qualities, or 
regulate the strength of your impulses. But you 
cannot even do that. Your ancestors have im- 
planted in you impulses which very seriously in- 
hibit you and impede you in your grappling with 
the world. There is anger which makes you mis- 
interpret people's attitudes towards you, and 

[15] 



makes you resist when you often should accept. 
There is fear, which makes you misinterpret the 
unfamiliar and haunts you with its freezing 
power all through life. There is love, which ties 
you irrationally and too strongly first to your 
mother and your father, and then to people who 
have no real part with you. And there is the 
swift revulsion into hatred, when the loved one 
resists or refuses you. These impulses, which are 
yours just because you are an animal, soon become 
your masters, and further tie your hands in your 
response to the bewildering world into which you 
have come. 

We grow up in the home that society has shaped 
or coerced our parents into accepting, we adopt 
the customs and language and utensils that have 
established themselves for our present through a 
long process of survival and invention and change. 
We take the education that is given us, and finally 
the jobs that are handed out to us by society. As 
adults, we act in the way that society expects us 
to act; we submit to whatever regulations and 
coercions society imposes on us. We live almost 
entirely a social life, that is, a life as a constituted 

[16] 



unit in society, rather than a free and personal 
one. Most people live a life which is little more 
than a series of quasi-official acts. Their conduct 
is a network of representations of the various 
codes and institutions of society. They act in 
such a way in order that some institutional or 
moral scripture may be fulfilled, rather than that 
some deep personal direction of growth should be 
realized. They may be half aware that they are 
not arrived at the place towards which their 
ardors pointed. They may dimly realize that 
their outward lives are largely a compulsion of 
social habit, performed, even after so many years, 
with a slight grudgingness. This divorce between 
social compulsion and personal desire, however, 
rarely rises to consciousness. Their conscious life 
is divided between the mechanical performance of 
their task, the attainment of their pleasures, and 
the wholly uncriticized acceptance and promulga- 
tion of the opinions and attitudes which society 
provides them with. 

*TTie normal, or the common, relation between 
society and the individual in any society that we 
know of is that the individual scarcely existsj 

[17] 



Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of so- 
ciety's folk-ways, as counters in the game of so- 
ciety's ordainings, are outlawed, and there exists 
an elaborate machinery for dealing with such peo- 
ple. Artists, philosophers, geniuses, tramps, 
criminals, eccentrics, aliens, free-lovers and free- 
thinkers, and persons who challenge the most 
sacred taboos, are treated with great concern by 
society, and in the hue and cry after them all, 
respectable and responsible men unanimously and 
universally join. Some are merely made uncom- 
fortable, the light of society's countenance being 
drawn from them; others are deprived of their 
liberty, placed for years in foul dungeons, or even 
executed. The heaviest penalties in modern so- 
ciety fall upon those who violate any of the three 
sacred taboos of property, sex and the State. 
Religion, which was for so many centuries the 
most exigent and ubiquitous symbol of society's 
demand for conformity, has lapsed in these later 
days and bequeathed most of its virus to the State. 
Society no longer demands conformity of opinion 
in religion, even in those countries where nominal 
adherence is still required. 

[18] 



There is nothing fixed about the objects to 
which society demands conformity. It is only the 
quantity that seems to be constant. So much 
conformity, like the conservation of physical 
energy in the universe, but the manners in which 
people shall think alike, or behave, or what ob- 
jects they shall consider sacred, differ in myriad 
ways throughout different social groupings and in 
different eras. Diametrically opposite ideas are 
held in two social groups with the same vigor and 
fury; diametrically opposite conduct is considered 
equally praiseworthy and necessary; two social 
groups will visit with the same punishment two 
diametrically opposite actions. To any student 
of primitive societies or of the history of Western 
civilization, these facts are commonplaces. But 
the moral is not a commonplace as yet. Yet it 
must be evident that;' most of the customs and at- 
titudes of these societies were almost wholly ir- 
rational, that is, they were social habits which 
persisted solely through inertia and the satisfac- 
tion they gave the gregarious impulse. The lat- 
ter had to be satisfied, so that anything which cost 
the least in invention or reasoning or effort would 

[19] 



do. The customs, therefore, of primitive tribes 
seem to practically everybody in a modern West- 
ern society outlandish and foolish. What evi- 
dence is there that our codes and conformities 
which perform exactly the same role, and are 
mostly traditional survivals, are any the less out- 
landish and irrational ? May they not be tainted 
with the same purposelessness ? Is not the in- 
ference irresistible that they are? They seem 
to us to be intelligent and necessary not because 
we have derived them or invented them for a 
clearly imagined and desired end, but because they 
satisfy our need for acting in a herd, just as the 
primitive savage is satisfied. 

The most important fact we can realize about 
society is that to every one of us that comes into 
the world it is something given, irreducible. We 
are as little responsible for it as we are for our 
own birth. From our point of view it is just as 
much a non-premeditated, non-created, irrational 
portion of our environment, as is the weather. 
Entering it in the closing years of the Nineteenth 
century, we find it as it exists and as it has de- 
veloped through the centuries of human change. 

[20] 



We had nothing whatever to do with its being as 
it is, and by the time we have reached such years 
of discretion as dimly to understand the complex 
of institutions around us, we are implicated in it 
and compromised by it as to be little able to effect 
any change in its irresistible bulk. No man who 
ever lived found himself in a different relation to 
society from what we find ourselves. We all 
enter as individuals into an organized herd-whole 
in which we are as significant as a drop of water 
in the ocean, and against which we can about as 
much prevail^ Whether we shall act in the in- 
terests of ourselves or of society is, therefore, an 
entirely academic question. For entering as we 
do a society which is all prepared for us, so toughly 
grounded and immalleable that even if we came 
equipped with weapons to assail it and make good 
some individual preference, we could not in our 
puny strength achieve anything against it. But 
we come entirely helpless. 



[21] 



II 

THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS 

(June, 1917) 

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable 
animus against war, it has been a bitter experience 
to see the unanimity with which the American in- 
tellectuals have thrown their support to the use 
of war-technique in the crisis in which America 
found herself. Socialists, college professors, 
publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of litera- 
ture, have vied with each other in confirming with 
their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality 
and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred 
million more of the world's people. And the in- 
tellectuals are not content with confirming our 
belligerent gesture. They are now complacently 
asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, 
against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the 

[22] 



American democratic masses. A war made de- 
liberately by the intellectuals ! A calm moral 
verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of 
inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote 
from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking 
in intellect to perceive 'their danger! An alert 
intellectual class, saving the people in spite of 
themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy 
until the nation could be moved into war without 
serious resistance ! An intellectual class, gently 
guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into 
what the other nations entered only through pre- 
datory craft or popular hysteria or militarist mad- 
ness ! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, 
a war that will secure the triumph of democracy 
and internationalize the world! This is the pic- 
ture which the more self-conscious intellectuals 
have formed of themselves, and which they are 
slowly impressing upon a population which is be- 
ing led no man knows whither by an indubitably 
intellectualized President. And they are right, in 
that the war certainly did not spring from either 
the ideals or the prejudices, from the national 
ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, 

[23] 



however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and 
however clearly the intellectuals prove their 
putative intuition. 

Those intellectuals who have felt themselves 
totally out of sympathy with this drag toward 
war will seek some explanation for this joyful 
leadership. They will want to understand this 
willingness of the American intellect to open the 
sluices and flood us with the sewage of the war 
spirit. We cannot forget the virtuous horror and 
stupefaction which filled our college professors 
when they read the famous manifesto of their 
ninety-three German colleagues in defense of their 
war. To the American academic mind of 1914 
defense of war was inconceivable. From Bern- 
hardi it recoiled as from a blasphemy, little dream- 
ing that two years later would find it creating its 
own cleanly reasons for imposing military service 
on the country and for talking of the rough rude 
currents of health and regeneration that war would 
send through the American body politic. They 
would have thought any one mad who talked of 
shipping American men by the hundreds of thou- 
sands — conscripts — to die on the fields of France. 

[24] 



Such a spiritual change seems catastrophic when 
we shoot our minds back to those days when neu- 
trality was a proud thing. But the intellectual 
progress has been so gradual that the country re- 
tains little sense of the irony. The war senti- 
ment, begun so gradually but so perseveringly by 
the preparedness advocates who came from the 
ranks of big business, caught hold of one after 
another of the intellectual groups. With the aid 
of Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous 
chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be 
out of it was at first to be disreputable and finally 
almost obscene. And slowly a strident rant was 
worked up against Germany which compared very 
creditably with the German fulminations against 
the greedy power of England. The nerve of the 
war-feeling centered, of course, in the richer and 
older classes of the Atlantic seaboard, and was 
keenest where there were French or English busi- 
ness and particularly social connections. The 
sentiment then spread over the country as a class- 
phenomenon, touching everywhere those upper- 
class elements in each section who identified them- 
selves with this Eastern ruling group. It must 

[25] 



never be forgotten that in every community it was 
the least liberal and least democratic elements 
among whom the preparedness and later the war 
sentiment was found. The farmers were apa- 
thetic, the small business men and workingmen 
are still * apathetic towards the war. The elec- 
tion was a vote of confidence of these latter classes 
in a President who would keep the faith of neu- 
trality. The intellectuals, in other words, have 
identified themselves with the least democratic 
forces in American life. They have assumed the 
leadership for war of those very classes whom the 
American democracy has been immemorially fight- 
ing. Only in a world where irony was dead could 
an intellectual class enter war at the head of such 
illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world- 
liberalism and world-democracy. No one is left 
to point out the undemocratic nature of this war- 
liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the 
most intolerable of all insults. 

Our intellectual class might have been occupied, 
during the last two years of war, in studying and 
clarifying the ideals and aspirations of the Ameri- 

1 June, 1917. 

[26] 



can democracy, in discovering a true Americanism 
which would not have been merely nebulous but 
might have federated the different ethnic groups 
and traditions. They might have spent the time 
in endeavoring to clear the public mind of the 
cant of war, to get rid of old mystical notions that 
clog our thinking. We might have used the time 
for a great wave of education, for setting our 
house in spiritual order. We could at least have 
set the problem before ourselves. If our in- 
tellectuals were going to lead the administration, 
they might conceivably have tried to find some 
way of securing peace by making neutrality 
effective. They might have turned their in- 
tellectual energy not to the problem of jockeying 
the nation into war, but to the problem of using 
our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends 
for the rest of the world and ourselves without 
the use of the malevolent technique of war. They 
might have failed. The point is that they scarcely 
tried. The time was spent not in clarification 
and education, but in a mulling over of nebulous 
ideals of democracy and liberalism and civilization 
which had never meant anything fruitful to those 

[27] 



ruling classes who now so glibly used them, and 
in giving free rein to the elementary instinct of 
self-defense. The whole era has been spiritually 
wasted. The outstanding feature has been not 
its Americanism but its intense colonialism. The 
offense of our intellectuals was not so much that 
they were colonial — for what could we expect of 
a nation composed of so many national elements"? 
— but that it was so one-sidedly and partisanly 
colonial. The official, reputable expression of 
the intellectual class has been that of the English 
colonial. Certain portions of it have been even 
more loyalist than the King, more British even 
than Australia. Other colonial attitudes have 
been vulgar. The colonialism of the other 
American stocks was denied a hearing from the 
start. America might have been made a meeting- 
ground for the different national attitudes. An 
intellectual class, cultural colonists of the different 
European nations, might have threshed out the 
issues here as they could not be threshed out in 
Europe. Instead of this, the English colonials in 
university and press took command at the start, 
and we became an intellectual Hungary where 

[28] 



thought was subject to an effective process of 
Magyarization. The reputable opinion of the 
American intellectuals became more and more 
either what could be read pleasantly in London, 
or what was written in an earnest effort to put 
Englishmen straight on their war-aims and war- 
technique. This Magyarization of thought pro- 
duced as a counter-reaction a peculiarly offensive 
and inept German apologetic, and the two par- 
tisans divided the field between them. The great 
masses, the other ethnic groups, were inarticulate. 
American public opinion was almost as little pre- 
pared for war in 1917 as it was in 1914. 

The sterile results of such an intellectual policy 
are inevitable. During the war the American 
intellectual class has produced almost nothing in 
the way of original and illuminating interpreta- 
tion. Veblen's "Imperial Germany"; Patten's 
"Culture and War," and addresses; Dewey's 
"German Philosophy and Politics"; a chapter or 
two in Weyl's "American Foreign Policies"; — is 
there much else of creative value in the intellectual 
repercussion of the war? It is true that the shock 
of war put the American intellectual to an unusual 

[29] 



strain. He had to sit idle and think as spectator 
not as actor. There was no government to which 
he could docilely and loyally tender his mind as 
did the Oxford professors to justify England in 
her own eyes. The American's training was such 
as to make the fact of war almost incredible. 
Both in his reading of history and in his lack of 
economic perspective he was badly prepared for 
it. He had to explain to himself something 
which was too colossal for the modern mind, which 
outran any language or terms which we had to 
interpret it in. He had to expand his sympathies 
to the breaking-point, while pulling the past and 
present into some sort of interpretative order. 
The intellectuals in the fighting countries had only 
•to rationalize and justify what their country was 
already doing. Their task was easy. A neutral, 
however, had really to search out the truth. Per- 
haps perspective was too much to ask of any mind. 
Certainly the older colonials among our college 
professors let their prejudices at once dictate their 
thought. They have been comfortable ever since. 
The war has taught them nothing and will teach 
them nothing. And they have had the satisfac- 

[30] 






tion, under the rigor of events, of seeing prejudice 
submerge the intellects of their younger colleagues. 
And they have lived to see almost their entire 
class, pacifists and democrats too, join them as 
apologists for the "gigantic irrelevance" of war. 

We have had to watch, therefore, in this coun- 
try the same process which so shocked us abroad, 
— the coalescence of the intellectual classes in sup- 
port of the military programme. In this country, 
indeed, the socialist intellectuals did not even have 
the grace of their German brothers and wait for 
the declaration of war before they broke for cover. 
And when they declared for war they showed how 
thin was the intellectual veneer of their socialism. 
For they called us in terms that might have 
emanated from any bourgeois journal to defend 
democracy and civilization, just as if it was not 
exactly against those very bourgeois democracies 
and capitalist civilizations that socialists had been 
fighting for decades. But so subtle is the spiritual 
chemistry of the "inside" that all this intellectual 
cohesion — herd-instinct become herd-intellect — 
which seemed abroad so hysterical and so servile, 
comes to us here in highly rational terms. We go 

[31] 



to war to save the world from subjugation! But 
the German intellectuals went to war to save their 
culture from barbarization ! And the French 
went to war to save their beautiful France ! And 
the English to save international honor! And 
Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, 
to save a small State from destruction ! Whence 
is our miraculous intuition of our moral spotless- 
ness*? Whence our confidence that history will 
not unravel huge economic and imperialist forces 
upon which our rationalizations float like bubbles'? 
The Jew often marvels that his race alone should 
have been chosen as the true people of the cosmic 
God. Are not our intellectuals equally fatuous 
when they tell us that our war of all wars is 
stainless and thrillingly achieving for good 4 ? 

An intellectual class that was wholly rational 
would have called insistently for peace and not for 
war. For months the crying need has been for a 
negotiated peace, in order to avoid the ruin of a 
deadlock. Would not the same amount of reso- 
lute statesmanship thrown into intervention have 
secured a peace that would have been a subjuga- 
tion for neither side 4 ? Was the terrific bargaining 

[32] 



power of a great neutral ever really used 4 ? Our 
war followed, as all wars follow, a monstrous 
failure of diplomacy. Shamefacedness should 
now be our intellectuals' attitude, because the 
American play for peace was made so little more 
than a polite play. The intellectuals have still 
to explain why, willing as they now are to use 
force to continue the war to absolute exhaustion, 
they were not willing to use force to coerce the 
world to a speedy peace. 

Their forward vision is no more convincing than 
their past rationality. We go to war now to 
internationalize the world! But surely their 
League to Enforce Peace is only a palpable 
apocalyptic myth, like the syndicalists' myth of 
the "general strike." It is not a rational pro- 
gramme so much as a glowing symbol for the pur- 
pose of focusing belief, of setting enthusiasm on 
fire for international order. As far as it does this 
it has pragmatic value, but as far as it provides a 
certain radiant mirage of idealism for this war 
and for a world-order founded on mutual fear, it 
is dangerous and obnoxious. Idealism should be 
kept for what is ideal. It is depressing to think 

[33] 



that the prospect of a world so strong that none 
dare challenge it should be the immediate ideal of 
'the American intellectual. If the League is only 
a makeshift, a coalition into which we enter to 
restore order, then it is only a description of exist- 
ing fact, and the idea should be treated as such. 
But if it is an actually prospective outcome of the 
settlement, the keystone of American policy, it is 
neither realizable nor desirable. For the pro- 
gramme of such a League contains no provision 
for dynamic national growth or for international 
economic justice. In a world which requires 
recognition of economic internationalism far more 
than of political internationalism, an idea is re- 
actionary which proposes to petrify and federate 
the nations as political and economic units. Such 
a scheme for international order is a dubious justi- 
fication for American policy. And if American 
policy had been sincere in its belief that our par- 
ticipation would achieve international beatitude, 
would we not have made our entrance into the war 
conditional upon a solemn general agreement to 
respect in the final settlement these principles of 
international order? Could we have afforded, if 

[34] 



our war was to end war by the establishment of a 
league of honor, to risk the defeat of our vision 
and our betrayal in the settlement'? Yet we are 
in the war, and no such solemn agreement was 
made, nor has it even been suggested. 

The case of the intellectuals seems, therefore, 
only very speciously rational. They could have 
used their energy to force a just peace or at least 
to devise other means than war for carrying 
through American policy. They could have used 
their intellectual energy to ensure that our par- 
ticipation in the war meant the international order 
which they wish. Intellect was not so used. It 
was used to lead an apathetic nation into an irre- 
sponsible war, without guarantees from those 
belligerents whose cause we were saving. The 
American intellectual, therefore, has been rational 
neither in his hindsight nor his foresight. To ex- 
plain him we must look beneath the intellectual 
reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so 
much what they thought as how they felt that 
explains our intellectual class. Allowing for 
colonial sympathy, there was still the personal 
shock in a world-war which outraged all our pre- 

[35] 



conceived notions of the way the world was tend- 
ing. It reduced to rubbish most of the humani- 
tarian internationalism and democratic national- 
ism which had been the emotional thread of our 
intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a 
new orientation. There were mental conflicts. 
Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for 
American unity. Our desire for peace strove with 
our desire for national responsibility in the world. 
That first lofty and remote and not altogether un- 
sound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the 
conflict could not last. There was the itch to be 
in the great experience which the rest of the world 
was having. Numbers of intelligent people who 
had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic 
peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by 
the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having 
felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed 
masses and excluded races at home, they had a 
large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in 
the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of 
Europe. Hearts that had felt only ugly contempt 
for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with 
the struggle for freedom abroad. All this was 

[36] 



natural, but it tended to over-emphasize our re- 
sponsibility. And it threw our thinking out of 
gear. The task of making our own country de- 
tailedly fit for peace was abandoned in favor of a 
feverish concern for the management of the war, 
advice to the fighting governments on all matters, 
military, social and political, and a gradual work- 
ing up of the conviction that we were ordained as 
a nation to lead all erring brothers towards the 
light of liberty and democracy. The failure of 
the American intellectual class to erect a creative 
attitude toward the war can be explained by these 
sterile mental conflicts which the shock to our 
ideals sent raging through us. 

Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher 
synthesis or adjustment, or else in a reversion to 
more primitive ideas which have been outgrown 
but to which we drop when jolted out of our at- 
tained position. The war caused in America a 
recrudescence of nebulous ideals which a younger 
generation was fast outgrowing because it had 
passed the wistful stage and was discovering con- 
crete ways of getting them incarnated in actual in- 
stitutions. The shock of the war threw us back 

[37] 



from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath 
of these old ideals. There was even a somewhat 
rarefied revival of our primitive Yankee boastful- 
ness, the reversion of senility to that republican 
childhood when we expected the whole world to 
copy our republican institutions. We amusingly 
ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial 
German regime, to whom we are to teach the art 
of self-government, which our own Federal struc- 
ture, with its executive irresponsible in foreign 
policy and with its absence of parliamentary con- 
trol, most resembles. And we are missing the 
exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid by 
the American democratic intellectuals to the last 
and most detested of Britain's tory premiers as 
the representative of a "liberal" ally, as well as 
the irony of the selection of the best hated of 
America's bourbon "old guard" as the missionary 
of American democracy to Russia. 

The intellectual state that could produce such 
things is one where reversion has taken place to 
more primitive ways of thinking. Simple syllo- 
gisms are substituted for analysis, things are 
known by their labels, our heart's desire dictates 

[38] 



what we shall see. The American intellectual 
class, having failed to make the higher syntheses, 
regresses to ideas that can issue in quick, simplified 
action. Thought becomes any easy rationaliza- 
tion of what is actually going on or what is to 
happen inevitably to-morrow. It is true that cer- 
tain groups did rationalize their colonialism and 
attach the doctrine of the inviolability of British 
sea-power to the doctrine of a League of Peace. 
But this agile resolution of the mental conflict did 
not become a higher synthesis, to be creatively 
developed. It gradually merged into a justifica- 
tion for our going to war. It petrified into a 
dogma to be propagated. Criticism flagged and 
emotional propaganda began. Most of the so- 
cialists, the college professors and the practitioners 
of literature, however, have not even reached this 
high-water mark of synthesis. Their mental con- 
flicts have been resolved much more simply. War 
in the interests of democracy! This was almost 
the sum of their philosophy. The primitive idea 
to which they regressed became almost insensibly 
translated into a craving for action. War was 
seen as the crowning relief of their indecision. 

[39] 



At last action, irresponsibility, the end of anxious 
and torturing attempts to reconcile peace-ideals 
with the drag of the world towards Hell. An 
end to the pain of trying to adjust the facts to 
what they ought to be ! Let us consecrate the 
facts as ideal! Let us join the greased slide 
towards war! The momentum increased. Hesi- 
tations, ironies, consciences, considerations, — all 
were drowned in the elemental blare of doing 
something aggressive, colossal. The new-found 
Sabbath "peacefulness of being at war" ! The 
thankfulness with which so many intellectuals lay 
down and floated with the current betrays the 
hesitation and suspense through which they had 
been. The American university is a brisk and 
happy place these days. Simple, unquestioning 
action has superseded the knots of thought. The 
thinker dances with reality. 

With how many of the acceptors of war has it 
been mostly a dread of intellectual suspense 5 ? It 
is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality neces- 
sarily makes for suspended judgments. The in- 
tellect craves certitude. It takes effort to keep it 
supple and pliable. In a time of danger and 

[40] 



disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to 
cling to. The time comes, if we try to hold out, 
when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we 
seize in a great healing wave of release some doc- 
trine that can be immediately translated into ac- 
tion. Neutrality meant suspense, and so it 
became the object of loathing to frayed nerves. 
The vital myth of the League of Peace provides a 
dogma to jump to. With war the world becomes 
motor again and speculation is brushed aside like 
cobwebs. The blessed emotion of self-defense 
intervenes too, which focused millions in Europe. 
A few keep up a critical pose after war is begun, 
but since they usually advise action which is in 
one-to-one correspondence with what the mass is 
already doing, their criticism is little more than a 
rationalization of the common emotional drive. 

The results of war on the intellectual class are 
already apparent. Their thought becomes little 
more than a description and justification of what 
is going on. They turn upon any rash one who 
continues idly to speculate. Once the war is on, 
the conviction spreads that individual thought is 
helpless, that the only way one can count is as a 

[41] 



cog in the great wheel. There is no good holding 
back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and in- 
effective tears and plunge into the great work. 
Not only is every one forced into line, but the 
new certitude becomes idealized. It is a noble 
realism which opposes itself to futile obstruction 
and the cowardly refusal to face facts. This 
realistic boast is so loud and sonorous that one 
wonders whether realism is always a stern and 
intelligent grappling with realities. May it not 
be sometimes a mere surrender to the actual, an 
abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue 
from intellectual suspense? The pacifist is 
roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and 
for retiring into his own world of sentimental 
desire. But is the realist, who refuses to chal- 
lenge or criticize facts, entitled to any more credit 
than that which comes from following the line of 
least resistance? The realist thinks he at least 
can control events by linking himself to the forces 
that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a 
question of controlling war, it is difficult to see 
how the child on the back of a mad elephant is to 
be any more effective in stopping the beast than 

[42] 



is the child who tries to stop him from the ground. 
The ex-humanitarian, turned realist, sneers at the 
snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked 
thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are still 
unable to find any balm of consolation for this 
war. We manufacture consolations here in 
America while there are probably not a dozen men 
fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up 
every reason for their being there except that 
nobody knew how to get them away. 

But the intellectuals whom the crisis has 
crystallized into an acceptance of war have put 
themselves into a terrifyingly strategic position. 
It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, 
that one has any chance of controlling the current 
forces for liberal purposes. If we obstruct, we 
surrender all power for influence. If we respon- 
sibly approve, we then retain our power for guid- 
ing. We will be listened to as responsible think- 
ers, while those who obstructed the coming of war 
have committed intellectual suicide and shall be 
cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling 
powers will only be accepted from those intellec- 
tuals who are in sympathy with the general tend- 

[43] 



ency of the war. Well, it is true that they may 
guide, but if their stream leads to disaster and the 
frustration of national life, is their guiding any 
more than a preference whether they shall go over 
the right-hand or the left-hand side of the preci- 
pice'? Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on 
board. Be with us, they call, or be negligible, 
irrelevant. Dissenters are already excommuni- 
cated. Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their 
hands among the debris, become the most despic- 
able and impotent of men. There seems no choice 
for the intellectual but to join the mass of accept- 
ance. But again the terrible dilemma arises, — 
either support what is going on, in which case you 
count for nothing because you are swallowed in 
the mass and great incalculable forces bear you on ; 
or remain aloof, passively resistant, in which case 
you count for nothing because you are outside the 
machinery of reality. 

Is there no place left, then, for the intellectual 
who cannot yet crystallize, who does not dread sus- 
pense, and is not yet drugged with fatigue? The 
American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with 
reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy 

[44] 



is War rather than imperial Germany. There is 
work to be done to prevent this war of ours from 
passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. 
What shall we do with leaders who tell us that 
we go to war in moral spotlessness, or who make 
"democracy" synonymous with a republican form 
of government? There is work to be done in 
still shouting that all the revolutionary by- 
products will not justify the war, or make war 
anything else than the most noxious complex of all 
the evils that afflict men. There must be some 
to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer 
at those who buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice. 
There must be some irreconcilables left who will 
not even accept the war with walrus tears. There 
must be some to call unceasingly for peace, and 
some to insist that the terms of settlement shall be 
not only liberal but democratic. There must be 
some intellectuals who are not willing to use the 
old discredited counters again and to support a 
peace which would leave all the old inflammable 
materials of armament lying about the world. 
There must still be opposition to any contemplated 
"liberal" world-order founded on military coali- 

[45] 



tions. The "irreconcilable" need not be disloyal. 
He need not even be "impossibilist." His apathy 
towards war should take the form of a heightened 
energy and enthusiasm for the education, the art, 
the interpretation that make for life in the midst 
of the world of death. The intellectual who re- 
tains his animus against war will push out more 
boldly than ever to make his case solid against it. 
The old ideals crumble ; new ideals must be forged. 
His mind will continue to roam widely and cease- 
lessly. The thing he will fear most is premature 
crystallization. If the American intellectual 
class rivets itself to a "liberal" philosophy that 
perpetuates the old errors, there will then be need 
for "democrats" whose task will be to divide, con- 
fuse, disturb, keep the intellectual waters con- 
stantly in motion to prevent any such ice from ever 
forming. 



[46] 



Ill 

BELOW THE BATTLE 

(July, 1917) 

He is one of those young men who, because his 
parents happened to mate during a certain ten 
years of the world's history, has had now to put 
his name on a wheel of fate, thereby submitting 
himself to be drawn into a brief sharp course of 
military training before being shipped across the 
sea to kill Germans or be killed by them. He 
does not like this fate that menaces him, and he 
dislikes it because he seems to find nothing in the 
programme marked out for him which touches re- 
motely his aspirations, his impulses, or even his 
desires. My friend is not a happy young man, 
but even the unsatisfactory life he is living seems 
supplemented at no single point by the life of the 
drill-ground or the camp or the stinking trench. 

[47] 



He visualizes the obscenity of the battlefield and 
turns away in nausea. He thinks of the weary 
regimentation of young men, and is filled with 
disgust. His mind has turned sour on war and 
all that it involves. He is poor material for the 
military proclamation and the drill-sergeant. 

I want to understand this friend of mine, for he 
seems rather typical of a scattered race of young 
Americans of to-day. He does not fall easily 
into the categories of patriot and coward which 
the papers are making popular. He feels neither 
patriotism nor fear, only an apathy toward the 
war, faintly warmed into a smoldering resent- 
ment at the men who have clamped down the war- 
pattern upon him and that vague mass of people 
and ideas and workaday living around him that 
he thinks of as his country. Now that resent- 
ment has knotted itself into a tortured tangle of 
what he should do, how he can best be true to his 
creative self? I should say that his apathy cannot 
be imputed to cowardly ease. My friend earns 
about fifteen hundred dollars a year as an archi- 
tect's assistant, and he lives alone in a little room 
over a fruitshop. He worked his way through 

[48] 



college, and he has never known even a leisurely 
month. There is nothing Phseacian about his 
life. It is scarcely to save his skin for riotous 
living that he is reluctant about war. Since he 
left college he has been trying to find his world. 
He is often seriously depressed and irritated with 
himself for not having hewed out a more glorious 
career for himself. His work is just interesting 
enough to save it from drudgery, and yet not 
nearly independent and exacting enough to give 
him a confident professional sense. Outside his 
work, life is deprived and limited rather than 
luxurious. He is fond of music and goes to cheap 
concerts. He likes radical meetings, but never 
could get in touch with the agitators. His friends 
are seeking souls just like himself. He likes mid- 
night talks in cafes and studios, but he is not es- 
pecially amenable to drink. His heart of course 
is hungry and turbid, but his two or three love- 
affairs have not clarified anything for him. He 
eats three rather poor restaurant meals a day. 
When he reads, it is philosophy — Nietzsche, 
James, Bergson — or the novels about youth — 
Rolland, Nexo, Cannan, Frenssen, Beresford. 

[49] 



He has a rather constant mood of futility, though 
he is in unimpeachable health. There are mo- 
ments when life seems quite without sense or pur- 
pose. He has enough friends, however, to be not 
quite lonely, and yet they are so various as to leave 
him always with an ache for some more cohesive, 
purposeful circle. His contacts with people irri- 
tate him without rendering him quite unhopeful. 
He is always expecting he doesn't know quite 
what, and always being frustrated of he doesn't 
quite know what would have pleased him. Per- 
haps he never had a moment of real external or 
internal ease in his life. 

Obviously a creature of low vitality, with 
neither the broad vision to be stirred by the Presi- 
dent's war message, nor the red blood to itch for 
the dummy bayonet-charge. Yet somehow he 
does not seem exactly weak, and there is a con- 
sistency about his attitude which intrigues me. 
Since he left college eight years ago, he has been 
through most of the intellectual and emotional 
fads of the day. He has always cursed himself 
for being so superficial and unrooted, and he has 
tried to write a little of the thoughts that stirred 

[50] 



him. What he got down on paper was, of course, 
the usual large vague feeling of a new time that 
all of us feel. With the outbreak of the Great 
War, most of his socialist and pacifist theories 
were knocked flat. The world turned out to be 
an entirely different place from what he had 
thought it. Progress and uplift seemed to be in- 
definitely suspended, though it was a long time 
before he realized how much he had been corroded 
by the impact of news and the endless discussions 
he heard. I think he gradually worked himself 
into a truly neutral indifference. The reputable 
people and the comfortable classes who were hav- 
ing all the conventional emotions rather disgusted 
him. The neurotic fury about self-defense 
seemed to come from types and classes that he in- 
stinctively detested. He was not scared, and 
somehow he could not get enthusiastic about de- 
fending himself with "preparedness" unless he 
were badly scared. Things got worse. All that 
he valued seemed frozen until the horrible mess 
came to a close. He had gone to an unusually 
intelligent American college, and he had gotten a 
feeling for a humane civilization that had not left 

[51] 



him. The war, it is true, bit away piece by piece 
every ideal that made this feeling seem plausible. 
Most of the big men — intellectuals — whom he 
thought he respected had had so much of their 
idealism hacked away and got their nerves so 
frayed that they became at last, in their panic, 
willing and even eager to adopt the war-technique 
in aid of their government's notions of the way to 
impose democracy on the world. 

My poor young friend can best be understood 
as too naive and too young to effect this meta- 
morphosis. Older men might mix a marvelous 
intellectual brew of personal anger, fear, a sense 
of "dishonor," fervor for a League of Peace, and 
set going a machinery that crushed everything in- 
telligent, humane and civilized. My friend was 
less flexible. War simply did not mix with any- 
thing that he had learned to feel was desirable. 
Something in his mind spewed it out whenever it 
was suggested as a cure for our grievous American 
neutrality. As I got all this from our talks, he 
did not seem weak. He merely had no notion of 
the patriotism that meant the springing of a nation 
to arms. He read conscientiously The New 

[52] 



Republic's feast of eloquent idealism, with its ap- 
pealing harbingers of a cosmically efficacious and 
well-bred war. He would often say, This is all 
perfectly convincing; why, then, are we not all 
convinced'? He seemed to understand the argu- 
ment for American participation. We both stood 
in awe at the superb intellectual structure that was 
built up. But my friend is one of those unfor- 
tunate youths whose heart has to apprehend as 
well as his intellect, and it was his heart that in- 
exorably balked. So he was in no mood to feel 
the worth of American participation, in spite of 
the infinite tact and Fabian strategy of the Execu- 
tive and his intellectualist backers. He felt apart 
from it all. He had not the imagination to see a 
healed world-order built out of the rotten 
materials of armaments, diplomacy and "liberal" 
statesmanship. And he wasn't affected by the 
psychic complex of panic, hatred, rage, class- 
arrogance and patriotic swagger that was creating 
in newspaper editors and in the "jeunesse doree" 
around us the authentic elan for war. 

My friend is thus somehow in the nation but 
not of the nation. The war has as yet got no 

[53] 



conceivable clutch on his soul. He knows that 
theoretically he is united with a hundred million 
in purpose, sentiment and deed for an idealistic 
war to defend democracy and civilization against 
predatory autocracy. Yet somehow, in spite of 
all the excitement, nobody has as yet been able to 
make this real to him. He is healthy, intelligent, 
idealistic. The irony is that the demand which 
his country now makes on him is one to which not 
one single cell or nerve of idealism or desire re- 
sponds. The cheap and silly blare of martial life 
leaves him cold. The easy inflation of their 
will-to-power which is coming to so many people 
from their participation in volunteer or govern- 
ment service, or, better still, from their urging 
others to farm, enlist, invest, retrench, organize, — 
none of this allures him. His life is uninteresting 
and unadventurous, but it is not quite dull enough 
to make this activity or anything he knows about 
war seem a release into lustier expression. He 
has ideals but he cannot see their realization 
through a desperate struggle to the uttermost. He 
doubts the "saving" of an America which can only 
be achieved through world-suicide. He wants 

[54] 



democracy, but he does not want the kind of 
democracy we will get by this war enough to pay 
the suicidal cost of getting it in the way we set 
about it. 

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori^ sweet and 
becoming is it to die for one's country. This is 
the young man who is suddenly asked to die for 
his country. My friend was much concerned 
about registration. He felt coercive forces closing 
in upon him. He did not want to register for 
the purposes of being liable to conscription. It 
would be doing something positive when he felt 
only apathy. Furthermore, if he was to resist, 
was it not better to take a stand now than to wait 
to be drafted? On the other hand, was it not 
too much of a concession to rebel at a formality'? 
He did not really wish to be a martyr. Going 
to prison for a year for merely refusing to register 
was rather a grotesque and futile gesture. He did 
not see himself as a hero, shedding inspiration by 
his example to his fellows. He did not care what 
others did. His objection to prison was not so 
much fear perhaps as contempt for a silly sacrifice. 
He could not keep up his pose of complete aliency 

[55] 



from the war-enterprise, now that registration was 
upon him. Better submit stoically, he thought, to 
the physical pressure, mentally reserving his sense 
of spiritual aliency from the enterprise into which 
he was being remorselessly molded. Yet my 
friend is no arrant prig. He does not pretend to 
be a "world-patriot," or a servant of some higher 
law than his country's. Nor does he feel 
blatantly patriotic. With his groping philosophy 
of life, patriotism has merely died as a concept of 
significance for him. It is to him merely the emo- 
tion that fills the herd when it imagines itself en- 
gaged in massed defense or massed attack. Hav- 
ing no such images, he has no feeling of patriotism. 
He still feels himself inextricably a part of this 
blundering, wistful, crass civilization we call 
America. All he asks is not to be identified with 
it for warlike ends. He does not feel pro-Ger- 
man. He tells me there is not a drop of any but 
British blood in his veins. He does not love the 
Kaiser. He is quite willing to believe that it is 
the German government and not the German 
people whom he is asked to fight, although it may 
be the latter whom he is obliged to kill. But 

[56] 



he cannot forget that it is the American govern- 
ment rather than the American people who got up 
the animus to fight the German government. He 
does not forget that the American government, 
having through tragic failure slipped into the war- 
technique, is now trying to manipulate him into 
that war-technique. And my friend's idea of 
patria does not include the duty of warlike animus, 
even when the government decides such animus is 
necessary to carry out its theories of democracy 
and the future organization of the world. There 
are ways in which my friend would probably be 
willing to die for his country. If his death now 
meant the restoration of those ravaged lands and 
the bringing back of the dead, that would be a 
cause to die for. But he knows that the dead can- 
not be brought back or the brotherly currents re- 
stored. The work of madness will not be undone. 
Only a desperate war will be prolonged. Every- 
thing seems to him so mad that there is nothing left 
worth dying for. Pro patria mori, to my friend, 
means something different from lying gaunt as a 
conscript on a foreign battlefield, fallen in the last 
desperate fling of an interminable world-war. 

[57] 



Does this mean that if he is drafted he will 
refuse to serve? I do not know. It will not be 
any plea of "conscientious objection" that keeps 
him back. That phrase to him has already an 
archaic flavor which implies a ruling norm, a stiff 
familiar whom he must obey in the matter. It 
implies that one would be delighted to work up 
one's blood-lust for the business, except that this 
unaccountable conscience, like a godly grand- 
mother, absolutely forbids. In the case of my 
friend, it will not be any objective "conscience." 
It will be something that is woven into his whole 
modern philosophic feel for life. This is what 
paralyzes him against taking one step toward the 
war-machine. If he were merely afraid of death, 
he would seek some alternative service. But he 
does not. He remains passive and apathetic, 
waiting for the knife to fall. There is a growing 
cynicism in him about the brisk and inept bustle 
of war-organization. His attitude suggests that 
if he is worked into war-service, he will have to be 
corerced every step of the way. 

Yet he may not even rebel. He may go silently 

[58] 



into the ranks in a mood of cold contempt. His 
horror of useless sacrifice may make even the 
bludgeoning of himself seem futile. He may go 
in the mood of so many young men in the other 
countries, without enthusiasm, without idealism, 
without hope and without belief, victims of a 
tragically blind force behind them. No other 
government, however, has had to face from the 
very start quite this appalling skepticism of youth. 
My friend is significant because all the shafts of 
panic, patriotism and national honor have been 
discharged at him without avail. All the seduc- 
tions of "liberal" idealism leave him cold. He is 
to be susceptible to nothing but the use of crude, 
rough, indefeasible violence. Nothing could be 
more awkward for a "democratic" President than 
to be faced with this cold, staring skepticism of 
youth, in the prosecution of his war. The attitude 
of my friend suggests that there is a personal and 
social idealism in America which is out of reach 
of the most skillful and ardent appeals of the 
older order, an idealism that cannot be hurt by 
the taunts of cowardice and slacking or kindled by 

[59] 



the slogans of capitalistic democracy. This is the 
cardinal fact of our war — the non-mobilization of 
the younger intelligentsia. 

What will they do to my friend? If the war 
goes on they will need him. Pressure will change 
skepticism into bitterness. That bitterness will 
well and grow. If the country submissively pours 
month after month its wealth of life and resources 
into the work of annihilation, that bitterness will 
spread out like a stain over the younger American 
generation. If the enterprise goes on endlessly, 
the work, so blithely undertaken for the defense 
of democracy, will have crushed out the only 
genuinely precious thing in a nation, the hope and 
ardent idealism of its youth. 



[60] 



IV 

THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN 
STRATEGY 

(August, 1917) 

In the absorbing business of organizing Ameri- 
can participation in the war, public opinion seems 
to be forgetting the logic of that participation. It 
was for the purpose of realizing certain definite 
international ideals that the American democracy 
consented to be led into war. The meeting of 
aggression seemed to provide the immediate pre- 
text, but the sincere intellectual support of the 
war came from minds that hoped ardently for an 
international order that would prevent a recur- 
rence of world-war. Our action they saw as 
efficacious toward that end. It was almost wholly 
upon this ground that they justified it and them- 
selves. The strategy which they suggested was 

[61] 



very carefully worked out to make our participa- 
tion count heavily toward the realization of their 
ideals. Their justification and their strategy alike 
were inseparably bound up with those ideals. It 
was implicit in their position that any alteration 
in the ideals would affect the strategy and would 
cast suspicion upon their justification. Similarly 
any alteration in the strategy would make this 
liberal body of opinion suspicious of the devotion 
of the Government to those ideals, and would tend 
to deprive the American democracy of any con- 
fident morale it might have had in entering the 
war. The American case hung upon the con- 
tinued perfect working partnership of ideals, 
strategy and morale. 

In the eyes of all but the most skeptical radicals, 
American entrance into the war seemed to be 
marked by a singularly perfect union of these 
three factors. The President's address to Con- 
gress on April 2, supported by the December Peace 
note and the principles of the famous Senate ad- 
dress, gave the Government and American 
"liberalism" an apparently unimpeachable case. 
A nation which had resisted for so long a time the 

[62] 



undertow of war, which had remained passive be- 
fore so many provocations and incitements, needed 
the clearest assurance of unselfish purpose to carry 
it through the inevitable chaos and disillusionment 
of adopting a war-technique. That moment 
seemed to give this assurance. But it needed not 
only a clear, but a steady and unwavering assur- 
ance. It had to see day by day, in each move of 
war-policy which the Administration made, an 
unmistakable step toward the realization of the 
ideals for which the American people had con- 
sented to come into the war. American hesitation 
was overcome only by an apparently persuasive 
demonstration that priceless values of civilization 
were at stake. The American people could only 
be prevented from relapsing into their first hesita- 
tion, and so demoralizing the conduct of the war, 
by the sustained conviction that the Administra- 
tion and the Allied governments were fighting 
single-mindedly for the conservation of those 
values. It is therefore pertinent to ask how this 
conviction has been sustained and how accurately 
American strategy has been held to the justifying 
of our participation in the war. It is pertinent to 

[63] 



ask whether the prevailing apathy may not be due 
to the progressive weakening of the assurance that 
our war is being in any way decisive in the securing 
of the values for which we are presumably fighting. 
It will not be forgotten that the original logic 
of American participation hung primarily upon 
the menace of Germany's renewed submarine 
campaign. The case for America's entrance be- 
came presumably irresistible only when the safety 
of the British Commonwealth and of the Allies 
and neutrals who use the Atlantic highway was at 
stake. American liberal opinion had long ago de- 
cided that the logic of our moral neutrality had 
passed. American isolation was discredited as it 
became increasingly evident how urgent was our 
duty to participate in the covenant of nations 
which it was hoped would come out of the settle- 
ment. We were bound to contribute our re- 
sources and our good-will to this enterprise. Our 
position made it certain that however we acted we 
should be the deciding factor. But up to Feb- 
ruary first, 1917, it was still an arguable question 
in the minds of "liberals" whether we could best 
make that contribution through throwing in our lot 

[64] 



with the more pacific nations or by continuing a 
neutrality benevolent toward their better cause. 
For this benevolent neutrality, however strained, 
was still endurable, particularly when supple- 
mented by the hope of mediation contained in the 
"peace without victory" maneuvers and the prin- 
ciples of the Senate speech. 

This attempt to bring about a negotiated peace, 
while the United States was still nominally neu- 
tral, but able to bring its colossal resources against 
the side which refused to declare its terms, marked 
the highwater level of American strategy. 

For a negotiated peace, achieved before either 
side had reached exhaustion and the moral disaster 
was not irremediable, would have been the most 
hopeful possible basis for the covenant of nations. 
And the United States, as the effective agent in 
such a negotiated peace and as the most powerful 
neutral, might have assumed undisputed leader- 
ship in such a covenant. 

The strategy of "peace without victory" failed 
because of the refusal of Germany to state her 
terms. The war went on from sheer lack of a 
common basis upon which to work out a settle- 

[65] 



ment. American strategy then involved the per- 
sistent pressure of mediation. The submarine 
menace, however, suddenly forced the issue. The 
safety of the seas, the whole Allied cause, seemed 
suddenly in deadly peril. In the emergency be- 
nevolent neutrality collapsed. Liberal opinion 
could find no other answer to the aggression than 
war. In the light of the sequel those radicals who 
advocated a policy of "armed neutrality" seem 
now to have a better case. For American action 
obtained momentum from the imminence of the 
peril. The need was for the immediate guarantee 
of food and ships to the menaced nations and for 
the destruction of the attacking submarines. 
"Armed neutrality" suggested a way of dealing 
promptly and effectively with the situation. The 
providing of loans, food, ships, convoys, could os- 
tensibly have taken place without a declaration of 
war, and without developing the country's morale 
or creating a vast military establishment. It was 
generally believed that time was the decisive 
factor. The decision for war has therefore meant 
an inevitable and perhaps fatal course of delay. 
It was obvious that with our well-known unpre- 
[66] 



paredness of administrative technique, the lack of 
coordination in industry, and the unreadiness of 
the people and Congress for coercion, war meant 
the practical postponement of action for months. 
In such an emergency that threatened us, our only 
chance to serve was in concentrating our powers. 
Until the disorganization inherent in a pacific de- 
mocracy was remedied, our only hope of effective 
aid would come from focusing the country's 
energies on a ship and food programme, supple- 
mented by a naval programme devised realistically 
to the direct business at hand. The war could be 
most promptly ended by convincing the German 
government that the submarine had no chance of 
prevailing against the endless American succor 
which was beginning to raise the siege and clear 
the seas. 

The decision, however, was for war, and for a 
"thorough" war. This meant the immediate 
throwing upon the national machinery of far more 
activity than it could handle. It meant attaching 
to a food and ship programme a military pro- 
gramme, a loan programme, a censorship pro- 
gramme. All these latter have involved a vast 

[67] 



amount of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, 
and dissension. The country's energies and at- 
tention have been drained away from the simple 
exigencies of the situation and from the technique 
of countering the submarine menace and ending 
the war. Five months have passed since the be- 
ginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We 
have done nothing to overcome the submarine. 
The food and ship programmes are still uncon- 
solidated. The absorption of Congress and the 
country in the loan and the conscript army and 
the censorship has meant just so much less absorp- 
tion in the vital and urgent technique to provide 
which we entered the war. The country has been 
put to work at a vast number of activities which 
are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but 
which may have little relation to the particular 
situation in which this country found itself and to 
the particular strategy required. The immediate 
task was to prevent German victory in order to 
restore the outlines of our strategy toward a nego- 
tiated peace. War has been impotent in that im- 
mediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our 
very participation was a means of weakening our 
[68] 



strategy. We have not overcome the submarine 
or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has 
apparently made not a dent in the morale of the 
German people. The effect of our entrance, it 
was anticipated by liberals, would be the shorten- 
ing of the war. Our entrance has rather tended 
to prolong it. Liberals were mistaken about the 
immediate collapse of the British Commonwealth. 
It continued to endure the submarine challenge 
without our material aid. We find ourselves, 
therefore, saddled with a war-technique which has 
compromised rather than furthered our strategy. 

This war-technique compromises the outlines of 
American strategy because instead of making for 
a negotiated peace it has had the entirely unex- 
pected result of encouraging those forces in the 
Allied countries who desire la victoire integrate, 
the "knockout blow." In the President's war- 
message the country was assured that the prin- 
ciples of the negotiated peace remained quite un- 
impaired. The strategy that underlay this, it will 
be remembered, was to appeal to the Teutonic 
peoples over the heads of their rulers with terms 
so liberal that the peoples would force their gov- 

[69] 



ernments to make peace. The strategy of the 
American government was, while prosecuting the 
war, to announce its war-aims and to persuade the 
Allies to announce their war-aims in such terms 
as would split the peoples of the Central Powers 
from their governments, thus bringing more demo- 
cratic regimes that would provide a fruitful basis 
for a covenant of nations. We entered the war 
with no grievances of our own. It was our 
peculiar role to continue the initiative for peace, 
both by unmistakably showing our own purpose 
for a just peace based on some kind of inter- 
national organization and by wielding a steady 
pressure on the Entente governments to ratify our 
programme. If we lost this initiative for peace, 
or if we were unable or unwilling to press the 
Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism, our 
strategy broke down and our justification for en- 
tering the war became seriously impaired. For we 
could then be charged with merely aiding the En- 
tente's ambiguous scheme of European reorganiza- 
tion. 

The success of this strategy of peace depended 
on a stern disavowal of the illiberal programmes 

[70] 



of groups within the Allied countries and a sym- 
pathetic attitude toward the most democratic pro- 
grammes of groups within the enemy Powers. 
Anything which weakened either this disavowal 
or this sympathy would imperil our American case. 
As potential allies in this strategy the American 
government had within the enemies' gates the fol- 
lowers of Scheidemann who said at the last sitting 
of the Reichstag: "If the Entente Powers should 
renounce all claims for annexation and indemnity 
and if the Central Powers should insist on con- 
tinuing the war, a revolution will certainly result 
in Germany." It is not inconceivable that the 
American government and the German socialists 
had at the back of their minds the same kind of a 
just peace. The fact that the German socialists 
were not opposing the German government did not 
mean that any peace move in which the former 
were interested was necessarily a sinister Hohen- 
zollern intrigue. The bitterest enemies of Holl- 
weg were not the radicals but the Pan-Germans 
themselves. It is they who were said to be cir- 
culating manifestoes through the army threatening 
revolution unless their programme of wholesale 

[71] 



annexations is carried out. Whatever liberal 
reservoir of power there is in Germany, therefore, 
remains in the socialist ranks. If there is any 
chance of liberal headway against the sinister Pan- 
German campaign it is through this nucleus of 
liberal power. American strategy, if it has to find 
a liberal leverage in Germany, will have to choose 
the socialist group as against the Pan-Germans. 
It is not absolutely necessary to assume that the 
support of the Chancellor by the socialist majority 
is permanent. It is unplausible that the Scheide- 
mann group cooperates with the Government for 
peace merely to consolidate the Junker and mili- 
tary class in power after the war. It is quite con- 
ceivable that the socialist majority desires peace 
in order to have a safe basis for a liberal over- 
turn. Revolution, impossible while the Father- 
land is in danger, becomes a practicable issue as 
soon as war is ended. A policy of aiding the Gov- 
ernment in its pressure toward peace, in order to 
be in a tactical position to control the Government 
when the war-peril was ended, would be an ex- 
tremely astute piece of statesmanship. There is 
no evidence that the German socialists are incap- 

[72] 



able of such far-sighted strategy. Certainly the 
"German peace" of a Scheidemann is bound to be 
entirely different from the "German peace" of a 
Hindenburg. This difference is one of the de- 
cisive factors of the American strategy. To ig- 
nore it is to run the risk of postponing and per- 
haps obstructing the settlement of the war. 

It is these considerations that make the refusal 
of passports to the American socialists seem a seri- 
ous weakening of the American strategy. A con- 
ference of responsible socialists from the different 
countries might have clarified the question how far 
a Russian peace or a Scheidemann peace differed 
from the structure of a Wilson peace. By deny- 
ing American participation in the conference, the 
Administration apparently renounced the oppor- 
tunity to make contact with liberal leverage in 
Germany. It refused to take that aggressive step 
in cleaving German opinion which was demanded 
by its own strategy. It tended to discourage lib- 
eral opinion in Germany and particularly it dis- 
couraged the Russian democracy which was en- 
thusiastic for a socialist conference. 

This incident was symptomatic of the lessened 

[73] 



adjustment which the Administration has shown 
toward the changing situation. It was the hope of 
the American liberals who advocated American 
entrance into the war that this country would not 
lose thereby its initiative for peace. They be- 
lieved that our entrance would make our mediat- 
ing power actually stronger. That hope has been 
disappointed through the unexpected radicalism of 
the new Russian government. The initiative for 
peace was bound to lie with the people that most 
wanted peace and was willing to make the most 
peremptory demands upon the Allied governments 
that they state the war-aims that would bring it. 
This tactic was an integral part of the origi- 
nal American strategy. The American liberals 
trusted the President to use American participa- 
tion as an instrument in liberalizing the war-aims 
of all the Allied governments. In the event, how- 
ever, it has not been America that has wanted 
peace sufficiently to be peremptory about it. It 
has been Russia. The initiative for peace has 
passed from President Wilson into the hands of 
the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. 
It is the latter who have brought the pressure to 

[74] 



declare democratic war-aims. It is their dissatis- 
faction with the original Allied statement that has 
brought these new, if scarcely more satisfactory, 
declarations. In this discussion between the Gov- 
ernments regarding the restatement of war-aims, 
it was not upon Russia's side that this country 
found itself. The President's note to Russia had 
all the tone of a rebuke. It sounded like the re- 
action of a Government which — supposedly itself 
the leader in the campaign for a just peace — found 
itself uncomfortably challenged to state its own 
sincerity. The key to our American strategy has 
been surrendered to Russia. The plain fact is 
that the President has lost that position of leader 
which a Russian candor would have retained for 
him. 

What is more serious is that the note to Russia 
implied not only his loss of the initiative for a 
negotiated peace but even the desire for it. "The 
day has come when we must conquer or submit." 
This has a very strange ring coming from a Presi- 
dent who in his very war-message still insisted that 
he had not altered in any way the principles of his 
"peace without victory" note. The note to Rus- 

[75] 



sia did not attempt to explain how "peace without 
victory" was to be reconciled with "conquer or 
submit," nor has any such explanation been forth- 
coming. The implication is that the entire strat- 
egy of the negotiated peace has passed out of 
American hands into those of Russia, and that this 
country is committed to the new strategy of the 
"knockout blow." If this is true, then we have 
the virtual collapse of the strategy, and with it 
the justification, of our entrance into the war. 

Whether American strategy has changed or not, 
the effect upon opinion in the Allied countries 
seems to be as if it had. Each pronouncement of 
America's war-aims is received with disconcerting 
unanimity in England, France and Italy as ratify- 
ing their own aspirations and policies. Any hint 
that Allied policies disagree with ours is received 
with marked disfavor by our own loyal press. 
When we entered the war, the Allied aims stood 
as stated in their reply to the President's Decem- 
ber note. This reply was then interpreted by 
American liberals as a diplomatic programme of 
maximum demands. They have therefore called 
repeatedly upon the President to secure from the 

[76] 



Allied governments a resolution of the ambiguities 
and a revision of the more extreme terms, in order 
that we might make common cause with them to- 
ward a just peace. In this campaign the American 
liberals have put themselves squarely on the side 
of the new Russia, which has also clamored for a 
clear and liberal statement of what the war is be- 
ing fought for. Unfortunately the Administra- 
tion has been unable or unwilling to secure from 
the Allies any such resolution or revision. The 
Russian pressure has elicited certain statements, 
which, however, proved little more satisfactory to 
the Russian radicals than the original statement. 
Our own war-aims have been stated in terms as 
ambiguous and unsatisfactory as those of the Al- 
lies. Illiberal opinion in the other countries has 
not been slow in seizing upon President Wilson's 
pronouncements as confirming all that their hearts 
could wish. Most significant has been the satis- 
faction of Italian imperialistic opinion, the most 
predatory and illiberal force in any Allied country. 
The President has done nothing to disabuse Ital- 
ian minds of their belief. He has made no dis- 
avowal of the Allied reactionary ratification. The 

[77] 



sharp divergence of interpretation between the Al- 
lied governments and the Russian radicals persists. 
In lieu of any clear statement to the contrary, 
opinion in the Allied countries has good ground 
for believing that the American government will 
back up whatever of their original programme can 
be carried through. Particularly is this true after 
the President's chiding of Russia. The animus 
behind the enthusiasm for Pershing in France is 
the conviction that American force will be the de- 
cisive factor in the winning back of Alsace-Lor- 
raine. It is no mere sentimental pleasure at 
American alliance. It is an immense stiffening 
of the determination to hold out to the uttermost, 
to the "peace with victory" of which Ribot speaks. 
Deluded France carries on the war to complete ex- 
haustion on the strength of the American millions 
who are supposedly rushing to save her. The im- 
mediate effect of American participation in Eng- 
land and Italy as well has been an intense will to 
hold out not for the "peace without victory" but 
pour la victoire integrate, for the conquest so 
crushing that Germany will never be feared again. 
Now the crux of American strategy was the lib- 

[78] 



eralization of Allied policy in order that that 
peace might be obtained which was a hopeful basis 
for a League of Nations. American participation 
has evidently not gone one inch toward liberaliz- 
ing the Allies. We are further from the nego- 
tiated peace than we were in December, though the 
only change in the military and political situation 
is the Russian revolution which immensely in- 
creased the plausibility of that peace. As Allied 
hope of victory grows, the covenant of nations 
fades into the background. And it is Allied hope 
of victory that our participation has inflamed and 
augmented. 

The President's Flag Day address marks with- 
out a doubt the collapse of American strategy. 
That address, coupled with the hints of "effective 
readjustments" in the note to Russia, implies that 
America is ready to pour out endless blood and 
treasure, not to the end of a negotiated peace, but 
to the utter crushing of the Central Powers, to 
their dismemberment and political annihilation. 
The war is pictured in that address as a struggle to 
the death against the military empire of Mittel- 
Europa. The American role changes from that of 

[79] 



mediator in the interest of international organiza- 
tion to that of formidable support to the breaking 
of this menace to the peace and liberty of Europe. 
It will be remembered that American liberals in- 
terpreted our entrance into the war as primarily 
defensive, an enterprise to prevent Germany's 
threatened victory on the sea. We came in, not 
to secure an Allied "peace with victory," but to 
prevent a German "peace with victory," and so 
restore the situation favorable to a negotiated 
peace. The strategy of the negotiated peace de- 
pended largely on the belief that a military de- 
cision was either impossible or was not worth the 
colossal sacrifice it demanded. But it is only as 
the result of a sweeping military decision that any 
assured destruction of Mittel-Europa could come. 
In basing his case on Mittel-Europa, therefore, the 
President has clearly swung from a strategy of 
"peace without victory" to a strategy of "war to 
exhaustion for the sake of a military decision. ,, 
He implies that a country which came only after 
hesitation to the defense of the seas and the At- 
lantic world will contentedly pour out its in- 
definite blood and treasure for the sake of spoiling 

[80] 



the coalition of Mittel-Europa and of making re- 
adjustments in the map of Europe effective against 
German influence on the Continent. Such an im- 
plication means the "end of American isolation" 
with a vengeance. No one can be blamed who 
sees in the Flag Day Address the almost unlimited 
countersigning of Allied designs and territorial 
schemes. 

The change of American strategy to a will for 
a military decision would explain the creation of 
the vast American army which in the original pol- 
icy was required only "as a reserve and a precau- 
tion." It explains our close cooperation with the 
Allied governments following the visits of the 
Missions. An American army of millions would 
undoubtedly be a decisive factor in the remaking 
of the map of Europe and the permanent gar- 
risoning of strategic points bearing upon Ger- 
many. But this change of strategy does not ex- 
plain itself. The continental military and polit- 
ical situation has not altered in any way which jus- 
tifies so fundamental an alteration in American 
strategy. American liberals justified our entrance 
into the war as a response to a sudden exigency. 

[81] 



But the menace of Mittel-Europa has existed ever 
since the entrance of Bulgaria in 1915. If it now 
challenges us and justifies our change of strategy, 
it challenged us and justified our assault a full two 
years ago. American shudders at its bogey are 
doubly curious because it is probably less of a men- 
ace now than it has ever been. President Wilson 
ignores the effect of a democratic Russia on the 
success of such a military coalition. Such hetero- 
geneous states could be held together only through 
the pressure of a strong external fear. But the 
passing of predatory Russia removes that fear. 
Furthermore, Bulgaria, the most democratic of the 
Balkan States, would always be an uncertain part- 
ner in such a coalition. Bagdad has long been in 
British hands. There are strong democratic and 
federalistic forces at work in the Austro-Hunga- 
rian monarchy. The materials seem less ready 
than ever for the creation of any such predatory 
and subjugated Empire as the Flag Day Address 
describes. Whatever the outcome of the war, 
there is likely to result an economic union which 
could bring needed civilization to neglected and 
primitive lands. But such a union would be a 

[82] 



blessing to Europe rather than a curse. It was 
such a union that England was on the point of 
granting to Germany when the war broke out. 
The Balkans and Asia Minor need German sci- 
ence, German organization, German industrial de- 
velopment. We can hardly be fighting to pre- 
vent such German influence in these lands. The 
irony of the President's words lies in the fact that 
the hopes of Mittel-Europa as a military coalition 
seem to grow dimmer rather than brighter. He 
must know that this "enslavement" of the peoples 
of which he speaks can only be destroyed by the 
peoples themselves and not at the imposition of a 
military conqueror. The will to resist this Prus- 
sian enslavement seems to have been generated in 
Austro-Hungary. The President's perspective is 
belated. If our fighting to crush this amazing 
plot is justified now, it was more than justified as 
soon as Rumania was defeated. The President 
convicts himself of criminal negligence in not urg- 
ing us into the war at that time. If our role 
was to aid in conquest, we could not have begun 
our work too soon. 

The new strategy is announced by the President 

[83] 



in no uncertain terms — "The day has come when 
we must conquer or submit." But the strategy of 
conquest implies the necessity of means for con- 
solidating the conquest. If the world is to be 
made safe for democracy, democracy must to a 
certain extent be imposed on the world. There is 
little point in conquering unless you carry through 
the purposes for which you have conquered. The 
earlier American strategy sought to bring democ- 
racy to Germany by appealing directly to the dem- 
ocratic forces in Germany itself. We relied on a 
self -motivated regeneration on the part of our en- 
emy. We believed that democracy could be im- 
posed only from within. If the German people 
cannot effect their own political reorganization, 
nobody can do it for them. They would continue 
to prefer the native Hohenzollerns to the most 
liberal government imposed by their conquering 
enemies. A Germany forced to be de mocratic un- 
der the tutelage of a watchful and victorious En- 
tente would indeed be a constant menace to the 



peace oPEurope] JusTso far then as our changed 
American strategy contributes toward a conquest 
over Germany, it will work against our desire to 

[8 4 ] 



see that country spontaneously democratized. 
There is reason for hope that democracy will not 
have to be forced on Germany. From the present 
submission of the German people to the war-re- 
gime nothing can be deduced as to their subservi- 
ency after the war. Prodigious slaughter will 
effect profound social changes. There may be go- 
ing on a progressive selection in favor of demo- 
cratic elements. The Russian army was trans- 
formed into a democratic instrument by the wip- 
ing-out in battle of the upper-class officers. Men 
of democratic and revolutionary sympathies took 
their places. A similar process may happen in 
the German army. The end of the war may 
leave the German "army of the people" a genu- 
ine popular army intent upon securing control 
of the civil government. Furthermore, the con- 
tinuance of Pan-German predatory imperialism 
depends on a younger generation of Junkers to re- 
place the veterans now in control. The most dar- 
ing of those aristocrats will almost certainly have 
been destroyed in battle. The mortality in up- 
per-class leadership will certainly have proved far 
larger than the mortality in lower-class leadership. 

[85] 



The maturing of these tendencies is the hope of 
German democracy. A speedy ending of the war, 
before the country is exhausted and the popular 
morale destroyed, is likely best to mature these 
tendencies. In this light it is almost immaterial 
what terms are made. Winning or losing, Ger- 
many cannot replace her younger generation of 
the ruling class. And without a ruling class to 
continue the imperial tradition, democracy could 
scarcely be delayed. An enfeebled ruling class 
could neither hold a vast world military Empire 
together nor resist the revolutionary elements at 
home. The prolongation of the war delays de- 
mocracy in Germany by convincing the German 
people that they are fighting for their very exist- 
ence and thereby forcing them to cling even more 
desperately to their military leaders. In an- 
nouncing an American strategy of "conquer or 
submit," the President virtually urges the German 
people to prolong the war. And not only are the 
German people, at the apparent price of their ex- 
istence, tacitly urged to continue the fight to the 
uttermost, but the Allied governments are tacitly 
urged to wield the "knockout blow." All those 
[86] 



reactionary elements in England, France and 
Italy, whose spirits drooped at the President's or- 
iginal bid for a negotiated peace, now take heart 
again at this apparent countersigning of their most 
extreme programmes. 

American liberals who urged the nation to war 
are therefore suffering the humiliation of seeing 
their liberal strategy for peace transformed into a 
strategy for prolonged war. This government 
was to announce such war-aims as should persuade 
the peoples of the Central Powers to make an irre- 
sistible demand for a democratic peace. Our in- 
itiative with the Allied governments was to make 
this peace the basis of an international covenant, 
"the creation of a community of limited independ- 
encies," of which Norman Angell speaks. Those 
Americans who opposed our entrance into the war 
believed that this object could best be worked for 
by a strategy of continued neutrality and the con- 
stant pressure of mediation. They believed that 
war would defeat the strategy for a liberal peace. 
The liberal intellectuals who supported the Presi- 
dent felt that only by active participation on an 
independent basis could their purposes be 

[8 7 ] 



achieved. The event has signally betrayed them. 
We have not ended the submarine menace. We 
have lost all power for mediation. We have not 
even retained the democratic leadership among the 
Allied nations. We have surrendered the initia- 
tive for peace. We have involved ourselves in a 
moral obligation to send large armies to Europe 
to secure a military decision for the Allies. We 
have prolonged the war. We have encouraged 
the reactionary elements in every Allied country 
to hold out for extreme demands. We have dis- 
couraged the German democratic forces. Our 
strategy has gradually become indistinguishable 
from that of the Allies. With the arrival of the 
British Mission our "independent basis" became a 
polite fiction. The President's Flag Day Address 
merely registers the collapse of American strategy. 
All this the realistic pacifists foresaw when they 
held out so bitterly and unaccountably against our 
entering the war. The liberals felt a naive faith 
in the sagacity of the President to make their strat- 
egy prevail. They looked to him single-handedly 
to liberalize the liberal nations. They trusted 
him to use a war-technique which should consist of 
[88] 



an olive-branch in one hand and a sword in the 
other. They have had to see their strategy col- 
lapse under the very weight of that war-technique. 
Guarding neutrality, we might have counted to- 
ward a speedy and democratic peace. In the war, 
we are a rudderless nation, to be exploited as the 
Allies wish, politically and materially, and towed, 
to their aggrandizement, in any direction which 
they may desire. 



[89] 



A WAR DIARY 

(September, 1917) 

1 

Time brings a better adjustment to the war. 
There had been so many times when, to those 
who had energetically resisted its coming, it 
seemed the last intolerable outrage. In one's 
wilder moments one expected revolt against the 
impressment of unwilling men and the suppression 
of unorthodox opinion. One conceived the war 
as breaking down through a kind of intellectual 
sabotage diffused through the country. But as 
one talks to people outside the cities and away 
from ruling currents of opinion, one finds the pre- 
vailing apathy shot everywhere with acquiescence. 
The war is a bad business, which somehow got 
fastened on us. They don't want to go, but 
they've got to go. One decides that nothing gen- 

[90] 



erally obstructive is going to happen and that it 
would make little difference if it did. The kind 
of war which we are conducting is an enterprise 
which the American government does not have to 
carry on with the hearty cooperation of the Ameri- 
can people but only with their acquiescence. And 
that acquiescence seems sufficient to float an in- 
definitely protracted war for vague or even largely 
uncomprehended and unaccepted purposes. Our 
resources in men and materials are vast enough to 
organize the war-technique without enlisting more 
than a fraction of the people's conscious energy. 
Many men will not like being sucked into the ac- 
tual fighting organism, but as the war goes on they 
will be sucked in as individuals and they will 
yield. There is likely to be no element in the 
country with the effective will to help them resist. 
They are not likely to resist of themselves con- 
certedly. They will be licked grudgingly into 
military shape, and their lack of enthusiasm will 
in no way unfit them for use in the hecatombs nec- 
essary for the military decision upon which Allied 
political wisdom still apparently insists. It is un- 
likely that enough men will be taken from the po- 

[913 



tentially revolting classes seriously to embitter 
their spirit. Losses in the well-to-do classes will 
be sustained by a sense of duty and of reputable 
sacrifice. From the point of view of the worker, 
it will make little difference whether his work con- 
tributes to annihilation overseas or to construction 
at home. Temporarily, his condition is better if 
it contributes to the former. We of the middle 
classes will be progressively poorer than we should 
otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly 
drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies 
of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. 
But this will not cause us to revolt. There are 
not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a 
revolution. The materials seem generally absent 
from the country, and as long as a government 
wants to use the war-technique in its realization 
of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human 
resources of the country, regardless of popular 
mandate or understanding. 

ii 
If human resources are fairly malleable into the 
war-technique, our material resources will prove 

[92] 



to be even more so, quite regardless of the indi- 
vidual patriotism of their owners or workers. It 
is almost purely a problem of diversion. Fac- 
tories and mines and farms will continue to turn 
out the same products and at an intensified rate, 
but the government will be working to use their 
activity and concentrate it as contributory to the 
war. The process which the piping times of be- 
nevolent neutrality began will be pursued to its 
extreme end. All this will be successful, how- 
ever, precisely as it is made a matter of centralized 
governmental organization and not of individual 
offerings of goodwill and enterprise. It will be 
coercion from above that will do the trick rather 
than patriotism from below. Democratic con- 
tentment may be shed over the land for a time 
through the appeal to individual thoughtfulness in 
saving and in relinquishing profits. But all that 
is really needed is the cooperation with govern- 
ment of the men who direct the large financial 
and industrial enterprises. If their interest is en- 
listed in diverting the mechanism of production 
into war-channels, it makes not the least difference 
whether you or I want our activity to count in aid 

[93] 



of the war. Whatever we do will contribute to- 
ward its successful organization, and toward the 
riveting of a semi-military State-socialism on the 
country. As long as the effective managers, the 
"big men" in the staple industries remained loyal, 
nobody need care what the millions of little hu- 
man cogs who had to earn their living felt or 
thought. This is why the technical organization 
for this American war goes on so much more rap- 
idly than any corresponding popular sentiment for 
its aims and purposes. Our war is teaching us 
that patriotism is really a superfluous quality in 
war. The government of a modern organized 
plutocracy does not have to ask whether the people 
want to fight or understand what they are fighting 
for, but'tmly whether they will tolerate fighting. 
America does not cooperate with the President's 
designs. She rather feebly acquiesces. But that 
feeble acquiescence is the all-important factor. 
We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, 
doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sus- 
tain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, 
provided only that our industrial rulers see that 
the end of the war will leave American capital in 

[94] 



a strategic position for world-enterprise. The 
American people might be much more indifferent 
to the war even than they are and yet the results 
would not be materially different. A majority of 
them might even be feebly or at least unconcert- 
edly hostile to the war, and yet it would go gaily 
on. That is why a popular referendum seems so 
supremely irrelevant to people who are willing to 
use war as an instrument in the working-out of 
national policy. And that is why this war, with 
apathy rampant, is probably going to act just as if 
every person in the country were filled with pa- 
triotic ardor, and furnished with a completely as- 
similated map of the League to Enforce Peace. 
If it doesn't, the cause will not be the lack of pop- 
ular ardor, but the clumsiness of the government 
officials in organizing the technique of the war. 
Our country in war, given efficiency at the top, can 
do very well without our patriotism. The non- 
patriotic man need feel no pangs of conscience 
about not helping the war. Patriotism fades into 
the merest trivial sentimentality when it becomes, 
as so obviously in a situation like this, so pragmat- 
ically impotent. As long as one has to earn one's 

[95] 



living or buy tax-ridden goods, one is making one's 
contribution to war in a thousand indirect ways. 
The war, since it does not need it, cannot fairly 
demand also the sacrifice of one's spiritual integ- 
rity. 

in 
The "liberals" who claim a realistic and prag- 
matic attitude in politics have disappointed us in 
setting up and then clinging wistfully to the belief 
that our war could get itself justified for an ideal- 
istic flavor, or at least for a world-renovating 
social purpose, that they had more or less denied 
to the other belligerents. If these realists had had 
time in the hurry and scuffle of events to turn their 
philosophy on themselves, they might have seen 
how thinly disguised a rationalization this was of 
their emotional undertow. They wanted a 
League of Nations. They had an unanalyzable 
feeling that this was a war in which we had to be, 
and be in it we would. What more natural than 
to join the two ideas and conceive our war as the 
decisive factor in the attainment of the desired 
end ! This gave them a good conscience for will- 
ing American participation, although as good men 

[96] 



they must have loathed war and everything con- 
nected with it. The realist cannot deny facts. 
Moreover, he must not only acknowledge them but 
he must use them. Good or bad, they must be 
turned by his intelligence to some constructive 
end. Working along with the materials which 
events give him, he must get where and what he 
can, and bring something brighter and better out 
of the chaos. 

Now war is such an indefeasible and unescap- 
able Real that the good realist must accept it 
rather comprehensively. To keep out of it is pure 
quietism, an acute moral failure to adjust. At the 
same time, there is an inexorability about war. 
It is a little unbridled for the realist's rather nice 
sense of purposive social control. And nothing is 
so disagreeable to the pragmatic mind as any kind 
of an absolute. The realistic pragmatist could 
not recognize war as inexorable — though to the 
common mind it would seem as near an absolute, 
coercive social situation as it is possible to fall into. 
For the inexorable abolishes choices, and it is the 
essence of the realist's creed to have, in every sit- 
uation, alternatives before him. He gets out of 

[97] 



his scrape in this way: Let the inexorable roll in 
upon me, since it must. But then, keeping firm 
my sense of control, I will somehow tame it and 
turn it to my own creative purposes. Thus real- 
ism is justified of her children, and the "liberal" 
is saved from the limbo of the wailing and irre- 
concilable pacifists who could not make so easy an 
adjustment. 

Thus the "liberals" who made our war their 
own preserved their pragmatism. But events 
have shown how fearfully they imperilled their 
intuition and how untameable an inexorable really 
is. For those of us who knew a real inexorable 
when we saw one, and had learned from watching 
war what follows the loosing of a war-technique, 
foresaw how quickly aims and purposes would be 
forgotten, and how flimsy would be any liberal 
control of events. It is only we now who can ap- 
preciate The New Republic — the organ of ap- 
plied pragmatic realism — when it complains that 
the League of Peace (which we entered the war 
to guarantee) is more remote than it was eight 
months ago; or that our State Department has no 
diplomatic policy (though it was to realize the 

[98] 



high aims of the President's speeches that the in- 
tellectuals willed American participation) ; or that 
we are subordinating the political management of 
the war to real or supposed military advantages, 
(though militarism in the liberal mind had no jus- 
tification except as a tool for advanced social 
ends). If after all the idealism and creative in- 
telligence that were shed upon America's taking up 
of arms, our State Department has no policy, we 
are like brave passengers who have set out for the 
Isles of the Blest only to find that the first mate 
has gone insane and jumped overboard, the rudder 
has come loose and dropped to the bottom of the 
sea, and the captain and pilot are lying dead drunk 
under the wheel. The stokers and engineers, 
however, are still merrily forcing the speed up to 
twenty knots an hour and the passengers are pre- 
sumably getting the pleasure of the ride. 

IV 

The penalty the realist pays for accepting war 
is to see disappear one by one the justifications for 
accepting it. He must either become a genuine 
Realpolitiker and brazen it through, or else he 

[99] 



must feel sorry for his intuition and regretful that 
he willed the war. But so easy is forgetting and 
so slow the change of events that he is more likely 
to ignore the collapse of his case. If he finds that 
his government is relinquishing the crucial moves 
of that strategy for which he was willing to use the 
technique of war, he is likely to move easily to the 
ground that it will all come out in the end the same 
anyway. He soon becomes satisfied with tacitly 
ratifying whatever happens, or at least straining 
to find the grain of unplausible hope that may 
be latent in the situation. 

But what then is there really to choose between 
the realist who accepts evil in order to manipulate 
it to a great end, but who somehow unaccount- 
ably finds events turn sour on him. and the Uto- 
pian pacifist who cannot stomach the evil and will 
have none of it? Both are helpless, both are 
coerced. The Utopian, however, knows that he is 
ineffective and that he is coerced, while the realist, 
evading disillusionment, moves in a twilight zone 
of half-hearted criticism, and hopings for the best, 
where he does not become a tacit fatalist. The 
latter would be the manlier position, but then 
[100] 



where would be his realistic philosophy of intelli- 
gence and choice 4 ? Professor Dewey has become 
impatient at the merely good and merely consci- 
entious objectors to war who do not attach their 
conscience and intelligence to forces moving in an- 
other direction. But in wartime there are liter- 
ally no valid forces moving in another direction. 
War determines its own end — victory, and govern- 
ment crushes out automatically all forces that de- 
flect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path 
of organization to that end. All governments 
will act in this way, the most democratic as well 
as the most autocratic. It is only "liberal" 
naivete that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and 
suppression. Willing war means willing all the 
evils that are organically bound up with it. A 
good many people still seem to believe in a pe- 
culiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war. 
The pacifists opposed the war because they knew 
this was an illusion, and because of the myriad 
hurts they knew war would do the promise of de- 
mocracy at home. For once the babes and suck- 
lings seem to have been wiser than the children of 
light. 

[101] 



V 

If it is true that the war will go on anyway 
whether it is popular or not or whether its pur- 
poses are clear, and if it is true that in wartime con- 
structive realism is an illusion, then the aloof man, 
the man who will not obstruct the war but who 
cannot spiritually accept it, has a clear case for 
himself. Our war presents no more extraordinary 
phenomenon than the number of the more creative 
minds of the younger generation who are still ir- 
reconcilable toward the great national enterprise 
which the government has undertaken. The 
country is still dotted with young men and women, 
in full possession of their minds, faculties and vir- 
tue, who feel themselves profoundly alien to the 
work which is going on around them. They must 
not be confused with the disloyal or the pro-Ger- 
man. They have no grudge against the country, 
but their patriotism has broken down in the emer- 
gency. They want to see the carnage stopped and 
Europe decently constructed again. They want a 
democratic peace. If the swift crushing of Ger- 
many will bring that peace, they want to see Ger- 
many crushed. If the embargo on neutrals will 
[ 102] 



prove the decisive coup, they are willing to see the 
neutrals taken ruthlessly by the throat. But they 
do not really believe that peace will come by any 
of these means, or by any use of our war-technique 
whatever. They are genuine pragmatists and 
they fear any kind of an absolute, even when bear- 
ing gifts. They know that the longer a war lasts 
the harder it is to make peace. They know that 
the peace of exhaustion is a dastardly peace, leav- 
ing enfeebled the morale of the defeated, and leav- 
ing invincible for years all the most greedy and 
soulless elements in the conquerors. They feel 
that the greatest obstacle to peace now is the lack 
of the powerful mediating neutral which we might 
have been. They see that war has lost for us both 
the mediation and the leadership, and is blacken- 
ing us ever deeper with the responsibility for hav- 
ing prolonged the dreadful tangle. They are 
skeptical not only of the technique of war, but also 
of its professed aims. The President's idealism 
stops just short of the pitch that would arouse their 
own. There is a middle-aged and belated taint 
about the best ideals which publicist liberalism has 
been able to express. The appeals to propagate 

[ 103] 



political democracy leave these people cold in a 
world which has become so disillusioned of democ- 
racy in the face of universal economic servitude. 
Their ideals outshoot the government's. To them 
the real arena lies in the international class-strug- 
gle, rather than in the competition of artificial na- 
tional units. They are watching to see what the 
Russian socialists are going to do for the world, 
not what the timorous capitalistic American de- 
mocracy may be planning. They can feel no en- 
thusiasm for a League of Nations, which should 
solidify the old units and continue in disguise the 
old theories of international relations. Indispens- 
able, perhaps? But not inspiring; not something 
to give one's spiritual allegiance to. And yet the 
best advice that American wisdom can offer to 
those who are out of sympathy with the war is to 
turn one's influence toward securing that our war 
contribute toward this end. But why would not 
this League turn out to be little more than a well- 
oiled machine for the use of that enlightened im- 
perialism toward which liberal American finance 
is already whetting its tongue? And what is en- 
lightened imperialism as an international ideal as 

[ 104] 



against the anarchistic communism of the nations 
which the new Russia suggests in renouncing im- 
perialist intentions? 

VI 

Skeptical of the means and skeptical of the 
aims, this element of the younger generation stands 
outside the war, and looks upon the conscript army 
and all the other war-activities as troublesome in- 
terruptions on its thought and idealism, interrup- 
tions which do not touch anywhere a fiber of its 
soul. Some have been much more disturbed than 
others, because of the determined challenge of both 
patriots and realists to break in with the war- 
obsession which has filled for them their sky. Pa- 
triots and realists can both be answered. They 
must not be allowed to shake one's inflexible de- 
termination not to be spiritually implicated in the 
war. It is foolish to hope. Since the 30th of 
July, 1914, nothing has happened in the arena of 
war-policy and war-technique except for the com- 
plete and unmitigated worst. We are tired of 
continued disillusionment, and of the betrayal of 
generous anticipations. It is saner not to waste 

[105] 



energy in hope within the system of war-enterprise. 
One may accept dispassionately whatever changes 
for good may happen from the war, but one will 
not allow one's imagination to connect them or- 
ganically with war. It is better to resist cheap 
consolations, and remain skeptical about any of 
the good things so confidently promised us either 
through victory or the social reorganization de- 
manded by the war-technique. One keeps healthy 
in wartime not by a series of religious and political 
consolations that something good is coming out of 
it all, but by a vigorous assertion of values in 
which war has no part. Our skepticism can be 
made a shelter behind which is built up a wider 
consciousness of the personal and social and artis- 
tic ideals which American civilization needs to 
lead the good life. We can be skeptical construc- 
tively, if, thrown back on our inner resources from 
the world of war which is taken as the overmaster- 
ing reality, we search much more actively to clar- 
ify our attitudes and express a richer significance 
in the American scene. We do not feel the war 
to be very real, and we sense a singular air of 
falsity about the emotions of the upper-classes to- 

[106] 



ward everything connected with war. This os- 
tentatious shame, this groveling before illusory 
Allied heroisms and nobilities, has shocked us. 
Minor novelists and minor poets and minor pub- 
licists are still coming back from driving ambu- 
lances in France to write books that nag us into an 
appreciation of the "real meaning." No one can 
object to the generous emotions of service in a 
great cause or to the horror and pity at colossal 
devastation and agony. But too many of these 
prophets are men who have lived rather briskly 
among the cruelties and thinnesses of American 
civilization and have shown no obvious horror and 
pity at the exploitations and the arid quality of the 
life lived here around us. Their moral sense had 
been deeply stirred by what they saw in France 
and Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively 
unpracticed by deep concern and reflection over 
the inadequacies of American democracy. Few of 
them had used their vision to create literature im- 
pelling us toward a more radiant American future. 
And that is why, in spite of their vivid stirrings, 
they seem so unconvincing. Their idealism is too 
new and bright to affect us, for it comes from men 
[ 107] 



who never cared very particularly about great 
creative American ideas. So these writers come 
to us less like ardent youth, pouring its energy into 
the great causes, than like youthful mouthpieces of 
their strident and belligerent elders. They did 
not convert us, but rather drove us farther back 
into the Tightness of American isolation. 

VII 

There was something incredibly mean and ple- 
beian about that abasement into which the war- 
partisans tried to throw us all. When we were 
urged to squander our emotion on a bedeviled 
Europe, our intuition told us how much all rich 
and generous emotions were needed at home to 
leaven American civilization. If we refused to 
export them it was because we wanted to see them 
at work here. It is true that great reaches of 
American prosperous life were not using generous 
emotions for any purpose whatever. But the real 
antithesis was not between being concerned about 
luxurious automobiles and being concerned about 
the saving of France. America's "benevolent 
neutrality" had been saving the Allies for three 

[108] 



years through the ordinary channels of industry 
and trade. We could afford to export material 
goods and credit far more than we could afford to 
export emotional capital. The real antithesis was 
between interest in expensively exploiting Amer- 
ican material life and interest in creatively enhanc- 
ing American personal and artistic life. The fat 
and earthy American could be blamed not for not 
palpitating more richly about France, but for not 
palpitating more richly about America and her 
spiritual drouths. The war will leave the country 
spiritually impoverished, because of the draining 
away of sentiment into the channels of war. 
Creative and constructive enterprises will suffer 
not only through the appalling waste of financial 
capital in the work of annihilation, but also in the 
loss of emotional capital in the conviction that war 
overshadows all other realities. This is the poison 
of war that disturbs even creative minds. Writ- 
ers tell us that, after contact with the war, litera- 
ture seems an idle pastime, if not an offense, in a 
world of great deeds. Perhaps literature that can 
be paled by war will not be missed. We may feel 
vastly relieved at our salvation from so many 
[109] 



feeble novels and graceful verses that khaki-clad 
authors might have given us. But this nobly- 
sounding sense of the futility of art in a world 
of war may easily infect conscientious minds. 
And it is against this infection that we must fight. 

VIII 

The conservation of American promise is the 
present task for this generation of malcontents and 
aloof men and women. If America has lost its 
political isolation, it is all the more obligated to re- 
tain its spiritual integrity. This does not mean 
any smug retreat from the world, with a belief 
that the truth is in us and can only be contam- 
inated by contact. It means that the promise of 
American life is not yet achieved, perhaps not even 
seen, and that, until it is, there is nothing for us 
but stern and intensive cultivation of our garden. 
Our insulation will not be against any great crea- 
tive ideas or forms that Europe brings. It will be 
a turning within in order that we may have some- 
thing to give without. The old American ideas 
which are still expected to bring life to the world 
seem stale and archaic. It is grotesque to try to 
[no] 



carry democracy to Russia. It is absurd to try to 
contribute to the world's store of great moving 
ideas until we have a culture to give. It is ab- 
surd for us to think of ourselves as blessing the 
world with anything unless we hold it much more 
self-consciously and significantly than we hold 
anything now. Mere negative freedom will not 
do as a twentieth-century principle. American 
ideas must be dynamic or we are presumptuous in 
offering them to the world. 

IX 

The war — or American promise: one must 
choose. One cannot be interested in both. For 
the effect of the war will be to impoverish Ameri- 
can promise. It cannot advance it, however lib- 
erals may choose to identify American promise 
with a league of nations to enforce peace. Amer- 
icans who desire to cultivate the promises of Amer- 
ican life need not lift a finger to obstruct the war, 
but they cannot conscientiously accept it. How- 
ever intimately a part of their country they may 
feel in its creative enterprises toward a better life, 
they cannot feel themselves a part of it in its fu* 

[ml 



die and self-mutilating enterprise of war. We 
can be apathetic with a good conscience, for we 
have other values and ideals for America. Our 
country will not suffer for our lack of patriotism 
as long as it has that of our industrial masters. 
Meanwhile, those who have turned their thinking 
into war-channels have abdicated their leadership 
for this younger generation. They have put 
themselves in a limbo of interests that are not the 
concerns which worry us about American life and 
make us feverish and discontented. 

Let us compel the war to break in on us, if it 
must, not go hospitably to meet it. Let us force 
it perceptibly to batter in our spiritual walls. 
This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the 
sand, denying realities. When we are broken in 
on, we can yield to the inexorable. Those who 
are conscripted will have been broken in on. If 
they do not want to be martyrs, they will have to 
be victims. They are entitled to whatever allevi- 
ations are possible in an inexorable world. But 
the others can certainly resist the attitude that 
blackens the whole conscious sky with war. They 
can resist the poison which makes art and all the 

[112] 



desires for more impassioned living seem idle and 
even shameful. For many of us, resentment 
against the war has meant a vivider consciousness 
of what we are seeking in American life. 

This search has been threatened by two classes 
who have wanted to deflect idealism to the war, — 
the patriots and the realists. The patriots have 
challenged us by identifying apathy with disloy- 
alty. The reply is that war-technique in this sit- 
uation is a matter of national mechanics rather 
than national ardor. The realists have challenged 
us by insisting that the war is an instrument in the 
working-out of beneficent national policy. Our 
skepticism points out to them how soon their "mas- 
tery'' becomes "drift," tangled in the fatal drive 
toward victory as its own end, how soon they be- 
come mere agents and expositors of forces as they 
are. Patriots and realists disposed of, we can pur- 
sue creative skepticism with honesty, and at least a 
hope that in the recoil from war we may find the 
treasures we are looking for. 



[113] 



VI 
TWILIGHT OF IDOLS 

(October, 1917) 

1 
Where are the seeds of American promise*? 
Man cannot live by politics alone, and it is small 
cheer that our best intellects are caught in the po- 
litical current and see only the hope that America 
will find her soul in the remaking of the world. 
If William James were alive would he be accept- 
ing the war-situation so easily and complacently? 
Would he be chiding the over-stimulated intelli- 
gence of peace-loving idealists, and excommuni- 
cating from the ranks of liberal progress the piti- 
ful remnant of those who struggle "above the bat- 
tle"? I like to think that his gallant spirit would 
have called for a war to be gallantly played, with 
insistent care for democratic values at home, and 

[in] 



unequivocal alliance with democratic elements 
abroad for a peace that should promise more than 
a mere union of benevolent imperialisms. I think 
of James now because the recent articles of John 
Dewey's on the war suggest a slackening in his 
thought for our guidance and stir, and the inade- 
quacy of his pragmatism as a philosophy of life in 
this emergency. Whether James would have 
given us just that note of spiritual adventure 
which would make the national enterprise seem 
creative for an American future, — this we can 
never know. But surely that philosophy of 
Dewey's which we had been following so uncrit- 
ically for so long, breaks down almost noisily 
when it is used to grind out interpretation for the 
present crisis. These articles on "Conscience and 
Compulsion," 'The Future of Pacifism," "What 
America Will Fight For," "Conscription of 
Thought," which The New Republic has been 
printing, seem to me to be a little off-color. A 
philosopher who senses so little the sinister forces 
of war, who is so much more concerned over the 
excesses of the pacifists than over the excesses of 
military policy, who can feel only amusement at 

[115] 



the idea that any one should try to conscript 
thought, who assumes that the war-technique can 
be used without trailing along with it the mob- 
fanaticisms, the injustices and hatreds, that are or- 
ganically bound up with it, is speaking to another 
element of the younger intelligentsia than that to 
which I belong. Evidently the attitudes which 
war calls out are fiercer and more incalculable than 
Professor Dewey is accustomed to take into his 
hopeful and intelligent imagination, and the prag- 
matist mind, in trying to adjust itself to them, 
gives the air of grappling, like the pioneer who 
challenges the arid plains, with a power too big 
for it. It is not an arena of creative intelligence 
our country's mind is now, but of mob-psychology. 
\ The soldiers who tried to lynch Max Eastman 
showed that current patriotism is not a product of 
the will to remake the world. The luxuriant re- 
leases of explosive hatred for which peace ap- 
parently gives far too little scope cannot be wooed 
by sweet reasonableness, nor can they be the raw 
material for the creation of rare liberal political 
structures. All that can be done is to try to keep 
your country out of situations where such expres- 

[n6] 



sive releases occur. If you have willed the situa- 
tion, however, or accepted it as inevitable, it is 
fatuous to protest against the gay debauch of ha- 
tred and fear and swagger that must mount and 
mount, until the heady and virulent poison of 
war shall have created its own anti-toxin of ruin 
and disillusionment. To talk as if war were any- 
thing else than such a poison is to show that your 
philosophy has never been confronted with the 
pathless and the inexorable, and that, only dimly 
feeling the change, it goes ahead acting as if it 
had not got out of its depth. Only a lack of 
practice with a world of human nature so raw- 
nerved, irrational, uncreative, as an America at 
war was bound to show itself to be, can account 
for the singular unsatisfactoriness of these later ut- 
terances of Dewey. He did have one moment of 
hesitation just before the war began, when the war 
and its external purposes and unifying power 
seemed the small thing beside that internal ad- 
venture which should find our American promise. 
But that perspective has now disappeared, and one 
finds Dewey now untainted by skepticism as to our 
being about a business to which all our idealism 

[117] 



should rally. That failure to get guaranties that 
this country's effort would obligate the Allies to a 
democratic world-order Dewey blames on the de- 
fection of the pacifists, and then somehow man- 
ages to get himself into a "we" who "romanti- 
cally," as he says, forewent this crucial link of our 
strategy. Does this easy identification of himself 
with undemocratically controlled foreign policy 
mean that a country is democratic when it accepts 
what its government does, or that war has a nar- 
cotic effect on the pragmatic mind? For Dewey 
somehow retains his sense of being in the control- 
ling class, and ignores those anxious questions of 
democrats who have been his disciples but are now 
resenters of the war. 

What I come to is a sense of suddenly being left 
in the lurch, of suddenly finding that a philosophy 
upon which I had relied to carry us through no 
longer works. I find the contrast between the 
idea that creative intelligence has free functioning 
in wartime, and the facts of the inexorable situa- 
tion, too glaring. The contrast between what lib- 
erals ought to be doing and saying if democratic 
values are to be conserved, and what the real forces 

[118] 



are imposing upon them, strikes too sternly on my 
intellectual senses. I should prefer some philos- 
ophy of War as the grim and terrible cleanser to 
this optimism-haunted mood that continues un- 
weariedly to suggest that all can yet be made to 
work for good in a mad and half-destroyed world. 
I wonder if James, in the face of such disaster, 
would not have abandoned his "moral equivalent 
of war" for an "immoral equivalent" which, in 
swift and periodic saturnalia, would have acted as 
vaccination aginst the sure pestilence of war. 

ii 
Dewey's philosophy is inspiring enough for a 
society at peace, prosperous and with a fund of 
progressive good-will. It is a philosophy of hope, 
of clear-sighted comprehension of materials and 
means. Where institutions are at all malleable, 
it is the only clew for improvement. It is scien- 
tific method applied to "uplift." But this care- 
ful adaptation of means to desired ends, this ex- 
perimental working out of control over brute 
forces and dead matter in the interests of com- 
munal life, depends on a store of rationality, and is 

[119] 



effective only where there is strong desire for 
progress. It is precisely the school, the institu- 
tion to which Dewey's philosophy was first ap- 
plied, that is of all our institutions the most mal- 
leable. And it is the will to educate that has 
seemed, in these days, among all our social atti- 
tudes the most rationally motivated. It was edu- 
cation, and almost education alone, that seemed 
susceptible to the steady pressure of an "instru- 
mental" philosophy. Intelligence really seemed 
about to come into conscious control of an institu- 
tion, and that one the most potent in molding the 
attitudes needed for a civilized society and the ap- 
titudes needed for the happiness of the individual. 
For both our revolutionary conceptions of what 
education means, and for the intellectual strategy 
of its approach, this country is immeasurably in- 
debted to the influence of Professor Dewey's phi- 
losophy. With these ideas sincerely felt, a ra- 
tional nation would have chosen education as its 
national enterprise. Into this it would have 
thrown its energy though the heavens fell and the 
earth rocked around it. But the nation did not 
use its isolation from the conflict to educate itself. 
[120] 






It fretted for three years and then let war, not edu- 
cation, be chosen, at the almost unanimous behest 
of our intellectual class, from motives alien to 
our cultural needs, and for political ends alien to 
the happiness of the individual. But nations, of 
course, are not rational entities, and they act 
within their most irrational rights when they ac- 
cept war as the most important thing the nation 
can do in the face of metaphysical menaces of im- 
perial prestige. What concerns us here is the rel- 
ative ease with which the pragmatist intellectuals, 
with Professor Dewey at the head, have moved out 
their philosophy, bag and baggage, from education 
to war. So abrupt a change in the direction of 
the national enterprise, one would have expected 
to cause more emotion, to demand more apologet- 
ics. His optimism may have told Professor 
Dewey that war would not materially demoralize 
our growth — would, perhaps, after all, be but an 
incident in the nation's life — but it is not easy to 
see how, as we skate toward the bankruptcy of 
war-billions, there will be resources available for 
educational enterprise that does not contribute di- 
rectly to the war-technique. Neither is any pas- 
[121] 



sion for growth, for creative mastery, going to 
flourish among the host of militaristic values and 
new tastes for power that are springing up like 
poisonous mushrooms on every hand. 

How could the pragmatist mind accept war 
without more violent protest, without a greater 
wrench*? Either Professor Dewey and his friends 
felt that the forces were too strong for them, that 
the war had to be, and it was better to take it up 
intelligently than to drift blindly in; or else they 
really expected a gallant war, conducted with 
jealous regard for democratic values at home and 
a captivating vision of international democracy 
as the end of all the toil and pain. If their mo- 
tive was the first, they would seem to have reduced 
the scope of possible control of events to the van- 
ishing point. If the war is too strong for you to 
prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you 
to control and mold to your liberal purposes? 
And if their motive was to shape the war firmly 
for good, they seem to have seriously miscalculated 
the fierce urgencies of it. Are they to be content, 
as the materialization of their hopes, with a doubt- 
ful League of Nations and the suppression of the 
[122] 



I. W. W.*? Yet the numbing power of the. war- 
situation seems to have kept them from realizing 
what has happened to their philosophy. The be- 
trayal of their first hopes has certainly not dis- 
couraged them. But neither has it roused them to 
a more energetic expression of the forces through 
which they intend to realize them. I search Pro- 
fessor Dewey's articles in vain for clews as to the 
specific working-out of our democratic desires, 
either nationally or internationally, either in the 
present or in the reconstruction after the war. No 
programme is suggested, nor is there feeling for 
present vague popular movements and revolts. 
Rather are the latter chided, for their own vague- 
ness and impracticalities. Similarly, with the 
other prophets of instrumentalism who accompany 
Dewey into the war, democracy remains an unan- 
alyzed term, useful as a call to battle, but not an 
intellectual tool, turning up fresh sod for the 
changing future. Is it the political democracy of 
a plutocratic America that we are fighting for, or 
is it the social democracy of the new Russia? 
Which do our rulers really fear more, the menace 
of Imperial Germany, or the liberating influence 
[123] 



of a socialist Russia. In the application of their 
philosophy to politics, our pragmatists are slid- 
ing over this crucial question of ends. Dewey 
says our ends must be intelligently international 
rather than chauvinistic. But this gets us little 
distance along our way. 

In this difficult time the light that has been in 
liberals and radicals has become darkness. If 
radicals spend their time holding conventions to 
attest their loyalty and stamp out the "enemies 
within," they do not spend it in breaking intellec- 
tual paths, or giving us shining ideas to which we 
can attach our faith and conscience. The spir- 
itual apathy from which the more naive of us suf- 
fer, and which the others are so busy fighting, 
arises largely from sheer default of a clear vision 
that would melt it away. Let the motley crew 
of ex-socialists, and labor radicals, and liberals 
and pragmatist philosophers, who have united for 
the prosecution of the war, present a coherent and 
convincing democratic programme, and they will 
no longer be confronted with the skepticism of the 
conscientious and the impossibilist. But when 
the emphasis is on technical organization, rather 
[124] 



than organization of ideas, on strategy rather than 
desires, one begins to suspect that no programme 
is presented because they have none to present. 
This burrowing into war-technique hides the void 
where a democratic philosophy should be. Our 
intellectuals consort with war-boards in order to 
keep their minds off the question what the slow 
masses of the people are really desiring, or toward 
what the best hope of the country really drives. 
Similarly the blaze of patriotism on the part of 
the radicals serves the purpose of concealing the 
feebleness of their intellectual light. 

Is the answer that clear formulation of demo- 
cratic ends must be postponed until victory in the 
war is attained? But to make this answer is to 
surrender the entire case. For the support of the 
war by radicals, realists, pragmatists, is due — or 
so they say — to the fact that the war is not only 
saving the cause of democracy, but is immensely 
accelerating its progress. Well, what are those 
gains? How are they to be conserved? What 
do they lead to? How can we further them? 
Into what large idea of society do they group? 
To ignore these questions, and think only of the 



war-technique and its accompanying devotions, is 
to undermine the foundations of these people's 
own faith. 

A policy of "win the war first" must be, for the 
radical, a policy of intellectual suicide. Their 
support of the war throws upon them the responsi- 
bility of showing inch by inch the democratic 
gains, and of laying out a charter of specific hopes. 
Otherwise they confess that they are impotent and 
that the war is submerging their expectations, or 
that they are not genuinely imaginative and offer 
little promise for future leadership. 

in 
It may seem unfair to group Professor Dewey 
with Mr. Spargo and Mr. Gompers, Mr. A. M. 
Simons, and the Vigilantes. I do so only because 
in their acceptance of the war, they are all living 
out that popular American "instrumental" philos- 
ophy which Professor Dewey has formulated in 
such convincing and fascinating terms. On an In- 
finitely more intelligent plane, he is yet one with 
them in his confidence that the war is motivated 
by democratic ends and is being made to serve 

[126] 



them. A high mood of confidence and self -right- 
eousness moves them all, a keen sense of control 
over events that makes them eligible to disciple- 
ship under Professor Dewey's philosophy. They 
are all hostile to impossibilism, to apathy, to any 
attitude that is not a cheerful and brisk setting 
to work to use the emergency to consolidate the 
gains of democracy. Not, Is it being used? but, 
Let us make a flutter about using it! This una- 
nimity of mood puts the resenter of war out of 
the arena. But he can still seek to explain why 
this philosophy which has no place for the inexor- 
able should have adjusted itself so easily to the 
inexorable of war, and why, although a philos- 
ophy of the creative intelligence in using means 
toward ends, it should show itself so singularly 
impoverished in its present supply of democratic 
values. 

What is the matter with the philosophy? One 
has a sense of having come to a sudden, short stop 
at the end of an intellectual era. In the crisis, 
this philosophy of intelligent control just does 
not measure up to our needs. What is the root 
of this inadequacy that is felt so keenly by our 

[127] 



restless minds'? Van Wyck Brooks has pointed 
out searchingly the lack of poetic vision in our 
pragmatist "awakeners." Is there something in 
these realistic attitudes that works actually against 
poetic vision, against concern for the quality of 
life as above machinery of life*? Apparently 
there is. The war has revealed a younger intelli- 
gentsia, trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, 
immensely ready for the executive ordering of 
events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual 
interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends. 
The young men in Belgium, the officers' training 
corps, the young men being sucked into the coun- 
cils at Washington and into war-organization 
everywhere, have among them a definite element, 
upon whom Dewey, as veteran philosopher, might 
well bestow a papal blessing. They have ab- 
sorbed the secret of scientific method as applied to 
political administration. They are liberal, en- 
lightened, aware. They are touched with crea- 
tive intelligence toward the solution of political 
and industrial problems. They are a wholly new 
force in American life, the product of the swing 
in the colleges from a training that emphasized 

[128] 



classical studies to one that emphasized political 
and economic values. Practically all this ele- 
ment, one would say, is lined up in service of the 
war-technique. There seems to have been a pe- 
culiar congeniality between the war and these men. 
It is as if the war and they had been waiting for 
each other. One wonders what scope they would 
have had for their intelligence without it. Prob- 
ably most of them would have gone into industry 
and devoted themselves to sane reorganization 
schemes. What is significant is that it is the tech- 
nical side of the war that appeals to them, not the 
interpretative or political side. The formulation 
of values and ideals, the production of articulate 
and suggestive thinking, had not, in their educa- 
tion, kept pace, to any extent whatever, with 
their technical aptitude. The result is that the 
field of intellectual formulation is very poorly 
manned by this younger intelligentsia. While 
they organize the war, formulation of opinion is 
left largely in the hands of professional patriots, 
sensational editors, archaic radicals. The intel- 
lectual work of this younger intelligentsia is done 
by the sedition-hunting Vigilantes, and by the sav- 
[ 129] 



ing remnant of older liberals. It is true, Dewey 
calls for a more attentive formulation of war- 
purposes and ideas, but he calls largely to deaf 
ears. His disciples have learned all too literally 
the instrumental attitude toward life, and, being 
immensely intelligent and energetic, they are mak- 
ing themselves efficient instruments of the war- 
technique, accepting with little question the ends 
as announced from above. That those ends are 
largely negative does not concern them, because 
they have never learned not to subordinate idea to 
technique. Their education has not given them a 
coherent system of large ideas, or a feeling for 
democratic goals. They have, in short, no clear 
philosophy of life except that of intelligent serv- 
ice, the admirable adaptation of means to ends. 
They are vague as to what kind of a society they 
want, or what kind of society America needs, but 
they are equipped with all the administrative atti- 
tudes and talents necessary to attain it. 
* To those of us who have taken Dewey's philos- 
ophy almost as our American religion, it never 
occurred that values could be subordinated to 
technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had 
[130] 



our private Utopias so clearly before our minds 
that the means fell always into its place as con- 
tributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant 
his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, 
to start with values. But there was always that 
unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how 
values were created, and it became easier and eas- 
ier to assume that just any growth was justified 
and almost any activity valuable so long as it 
achieved ends. The American, in living out this 
philosophy, has habitually confused results with 
product, and been content with getting somewhere 
without asking too closely whether it was the de- 
sirable place to get. It is now becoming plain 
that unless you start with the vividest kind of 
poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to 
land you just where it has landed this younger 
intelligentsia which is so happily and busily en- 
gaged in the national enterprise of war. You 
must have your vision and you must have your 
technique. The practical effect of Dewey's phi- 
losophy has evidently been to develop the sense 
of the latter at the expense of the former. 
Though he himself would develop them together, 

[131] 



even in him there seems to be a flagging of values, 
under the influence of war. The New Republic 
honorably clamors for the Allies to subordinate 
military strategy to political ends, technique to 
democratic values. But war always undermines 
values. It is the outstanding lesson of the whole 
war that statesmen cannot be trusted to get this 
perspective right, that their only motto is, first to 
win and then grab what they can. The struggle 
against this statesmanlike animus must be a losing 
one as long as we have not very clear and very de- 
termined and very revolutionary democratic ideas 
and programmes to challenge them with. The 
trouble with our situation is not only that values 
have been generally ignored in favor of technique, 
but that those who have struggled to keep values 
foremost, have been too bloodless and too near- 
sighted in their vision. The defect of any philos- 
ophy of "adaptation" or "adjustment," even when 
it means adjustment to changing, living experi- 
ence, is that there is no provision for thought or 
experience getting beyond itself. If your ideal is 
to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant co- 
operation with reality, then your success is likely 
[132] 



to be just that and no more. You never transcend 
anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps 
out of your skin to go on wild adventures. If 
your policy as a publicist reformer is to take 
what you can get, you are likely to find that you 
get something less than you should be willing to 
take. Italy in the settlement is said to be de- 
manding one hundred in order to get twenty, and 
this Machiavellian principle might well be adopted 
by the radical. Vision must constantly outshoot 
technique, opportunist efforts usually achieve less 
even than what seemed obviously possible. An 
impossibilist elan that appeals to desire will often 
carry further. A philosophy of adjustment will 
not even make for adjustment. If you try merely 
to "meet" situations as they come, you will not 
even meet them. Instead you will only pile up 
behind you deficits and arrears that will some day 
bankrupt you. 

We are in the war because an American Govern- 
ment practiced a philosophy of adjustment, and 
an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of cre- 
ating new values and setting at once a large stand- 
ard to which the nations might repair. An intel- 
[133] 



lectual attitude of mere adjustment, of mere use 
of the creative intelligence to make your progress, 
must end in caution, regression, and a virtual fail- 
ure to effect even that change which you so clear- 
sightedly and desirously see. This is the root of 
our dissatisfaction with much of the current po- 
litical and social realism that is preached to us. 
It has everything good and wise except the obstrep- 
erous vision that would drive and draw all men 
into it. 

IV 

The working-out of this American philosophy 
in our intellectual life then has meant an exag- 
gerated emphasis on the mechanics of life at the 
expense of the quality of living. We suffer from 
a real shortage of spiritual values. A philosophy 
that worked when we were trying to get that ma- 
terial foundation for American life in which more 
impassioned living could flourish no longer works 
when we are faced with inexorable disaster and the 
hysterias of the mob. The note of complacency 
which we detect in the current expressions of this 
philosophy has a bad taste. The congruous note 
for the situation would seem to be, on the con- 

[134] 



trary, that of robust desperation, — a desperation 
that shall rage and struggle until new values come 
out of the travail, and we see some glimmering 
of our democratic way. In the creation of these 
new values, we may expect the old philosophy, the 
old radicalism, to be helpless. It has found a 
perfectly definite level, and there is no reason to 
think that it will not remain there. Its flowering 
appears in the technical organization of the war 
by an earnest group of young liberals, who direct 
their course by an opportunist programme of State- 
socialism at home and a league of benevolently 
imperialistic nations abroad. At their best they 
can give us a government by prudent, enlightened 
college men instead of by politicians. At their 
best, they can abolish war by making everybody a 
partner in the booty of exploitation. That is all, 
and it is technically admirable. Only there is 
nothing in the outlook that touches in any way 
the happiness of the individual, the vivifying of 
the personality, the comprehension of social forces, 
the flair of art, — in other words, the quality of 
life. Our intellectuals have failed us as value- 
creators, even as value-emphasizers. The allure 

[135] 



of the martial in war has passed only to be suc- 
ceeded by the allure of the technical. The allure 
of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of ar- 
tistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suf- 
fused by feeling, and feeling given fiber and out- 
line by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly 
come, we see now, while our reigning philosophy 
is an instrumental one. 

Whence can come this allure? Only from 
those who are thorough malcontents. Irritation 
at things as they are, disgust at the continual frus- 
trations and aridities of American life, deep dis- 
satisfaction with self and with the groups that 
give themselves forth as hopeful, — out of such 
moods there might be hammered new values. 
The malcontents would be men and women who 
could not stomach the war, or the reactionary 
idealism that has followed in its train. They are 
quite through with the professional critics and 
classicists who have let cultural values die through 
their own personal ineptitude. Yet these malcon- 
tents have no intention of being cultural vandals, 
only to slay. They are not barbarians, but seek 
the vital and the sincere everywhere. All they 

[136] 



want is a new orientation of the spirit that shall 
be modern, an orientation to accompany that 
technical orientation which is fast coming, and 
which the war accelerates. They will be harsh 
and often bad-tempered, and they will feel that 
the break-up of things is no time for mellowness. 
They will have a taste for spiritual adventure, and 
for sinister imaginative excursions. It will not be 
Puritanism so much as complacency that they will 
fight. A tang, a bitterness, an intellectual fiber, 
a verve, they will look for in literature, and their 
most virulent enemies will be those unaccountable 
radicals who are still morally servile, and are now 
trying to suppress all free speculation in the in- 
terests of nationalism. Something more mocking, 
more irreverent, they will constantly want. They 
will take institutions very lightly, indeed will 
never fail to be surprised at the seriousness with 
which good radicals take the stated offices and sys- 
tems. Their own contempt will be scarcely 
veiled, and they will be glad if they can tease, pro- 
voke, irritate thought on any subject. These mal- 
contents will be more or less of the American tribe 
of talent who used either to go immediately to 

[ 137] 



Europe, or starved submissively at home. But 
these people will neither go to Europe, nor starve 
submissively. They are too much entangled 
emotionally in the possibilities of American life 
to leave it, and they have no desire whatever to 
starve. So they are likely to go ahead beating 
their heads at the wall until they are either bloody 
or light appears. They will give offense to their 
elders who cannot see what all the concern is 
about, and they will hurt the more middle-aged 
sense of adventure upon which the better in- 
tegrated minds of the younger generation will 
have compromised. Optimism is often compen- 
satory, and the optimistic mood in American 
thought may mean merely that American life is 
too terrible to face. A more skeptical, malicious, 
desperate, ironical mood may actually be the sign 
of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting 
in America to-day. It may be a sign of hope. 
That thirst for more of the intellectual "war and 
laughter" that we find Nietzsche calling us to 
may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted 
philosophies could never bring. Malcontented- 
ness may be the beginning of promise. That is 

[138] 



why I evoked the spirit of William James, with 
its gay passion for ideas, and its freedom of 
speculation, when I felt the slightly pedestrian 
gait into which the war had brought pragmatism. 
It is the creative desire more than the creative in- 
telligence that we shall need if we are ever to fly. 



[139] 



VII 

UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE 
STATE 

(Winter, 1918) 

Government is synonymous with neither 
State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which 
the nation, organized as a State, carries out its 
State functions. Government is a framework of 
the administration of laws, and the carrying out 
of the public force. Government is the idea of 
the State put into practical operation in the hands 
of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the 
visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word 
made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations 
inherent in all practicality. Government is the 
only form in which we can envisage the State, but 
it is by no means identical with it. That the 
State is a mystical conception is something that 

[ Ho] 



must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its sig- 
nificance linger behind the framework of Gov- 
ernment and direct its activities. 

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into 
very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and ten- 
dencies that were hidden. In times of peace the 
sense of the State flags in a republic that is not 
militarized. For war is essentially the health of 
the State. The ideal of the State is that within 
its territory its power and influence should be 
universal. As the Church is the medium for the 
spiritual salvation of men, so the State is thought 
of as the medium for his political salvatio|n. Its 
idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the mem- 
bers of the body politic. And it is precisely in 
war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and 
the necessity for universality seems most unques- 
tioned. The State is the organization of the 
herd to act offensively or defensively against an- 
other herd similarly organized. The more terri- 
fying the occasion for defense, the closer will be- 
come the organization and the more coercive the 
influence upon each member of the herd. War 
sends the current of purpose and activity flowing 

[ho 



down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its 
most remote branches. All the activities of so- 
ciety are linked together as fast as possible to this 
central purpose of making a military offensive or 
a military defense, and the State becomes what 
in peace times it has vainly struggled to become — 
the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's 
businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack 
is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the 
nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with 
ever accelerated speed and integration, towards 
the great end, towards that "peacefulness of being 
at war," of which L. P. Jacks has so unforget- 
ably spoken. 

The classes which are able to play an active 
and not merely a passive role in the organization 
for war get a tremendous liberation of activity 
and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their 
old routine, many of them are given new positions 
of responsibility, new techniques must be learnt. 
Wearing home ties are broken and women who 
would have remained attached with infantile 
bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast 
sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant 
[ H2] 



classes, a sense of new importance in the world. 
Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to 
the purpose and used as universal touchstones, or 
molds into which all thought is poured. Every 
individual citizen who in peacetimes had no func- 
tion to perform by which he could imagine himself 
an expression or living fragment of the State be- 
comes an active amateur agent of the Government 
in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Gov- 
ernment funds, or in propagating such measures 
as are considered necessary by officialdom. 
Minority opinion, which in times of peace, was 
only irritating and could not be dealt with by law 
unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes, 
with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. 
Criticism of the State, objections to war, luke- 
warm opinions concerning the necessity or the 
beauty of conscription, are made subject to fero- 
cious penalties, far exceeding in severity those 
affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public 
opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the 
pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. 
"Loyalty," or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the 
sole test for all professions, techniques, occupa- 

[143] 



tions. Particularly is this true in the sphere of 
the intellectual life. There the smallest taint is 
held to spread over the whole soul, so that a pro- 
fessor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach 
physics or to hold honorable place in a university 
— the republic of learning — if he is at all un- 
sound on the war. Even mere association with 
persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a 
teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy be- 
comes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever 
possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic 
products are considered to convey in the subtlest 
spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul 
that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy 
music is suppressed, and energetic measures of 
opprobrium taken against those whose artistic 
consciences are not ready to perform such an act 
of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity 
works impartially, and often in diametric opposi- 
tion to other orthodoxies and traditional con- 
formities, or even ideals. The triumphant ortho- 
doxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps 
when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for 
taking more or less literal terms the Sermon on 

[ 144] 



the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to 
prison for twenty years for distributing tracts 
which argue that war is unscriptural. 

War is the health of the State. It automatic- 
ally sets in motion throughout society those irre- 
sistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co- 
operation with the Government in coercing into 
obedience the minority groups and individuals 
which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery 
of government sets and enforces the drastic pen- 
alties, the minorities are either intimidated into 
silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle proc- 
ess of persuasion which may seem to them really 
to be converting them. Of course the ideal of 
perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really 
attained. The classes upon whom the amateur 
work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, 
but often their agitation instead of converting, 
merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minori- 
ties are rendered sullen, and some intellectual 
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the 
nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, 
a hierarchy of values culminating at the undis- 
puted apex of the State ideal, which could not 

[145] 



possibly be produced through any other agency 
than war. Other values such as artistic creation, 
knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of 
life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacri- 
ficed, and the significant classes who have con- 
stituted themselves the amateur agents of the 
State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these 
values for themselves but in coercing all other 
persons into sacrificing them. 

War — or at least modern war waged by a 
democratic republic against a powerful enemy — 
seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the 
most inflamed political idealist could desire. 
Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Govern- 
ment, but each cell of the body politic is brimming 
with life and activity. We are at last on the 
way to full realization of that collective com- 
munity in which each individual somehow con- 
tains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at 
war, every citizen identifies himself with the 
whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that 
identification. The purpose and desire of the col- 
lective community live in each person who throws 
himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. 

[i 4 6] 



The impeding distinction between society and the 
individual is almost blotted out. At war, the in- 
dividual becomes almost identical with his so- 
ciety. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an 
intuition of the Tightness of all his ideas and 
emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents 
or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind 
him all the power of the collective community. 
The individual as social being in war seems to 
have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any 
religious impulse could the American nation have 
been expected to show such devotion en masse, 
such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any 
secular good, such as universal education or the 
subjugation of nature, would it have poured forth 
its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted 
such stern coercive measures to be taken against 
it, such as conscripting its money and its men. 
But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, 
undertaken to support a difficult cause to the 
slogan of "democracy," it would reach the highest 
level ever known of collective effort. 

For these secular goods, connected with the en- 
hancement of life, the education of man and the 

[ H7] 



use of the intelligence to realize reason and beauty 
in the nation's communal living, are alien to our 
traditional ideal of the State. The State is in- 
timately connected with war, for it is the organi- 
zation of the collective community when it acts in 
a political manner, and to act in a political man- 
ner towards a rival group has meant, throughout 
all history — war. 

There is nothing invidious in the use of the 
term, "herd," in connection with the State. It is 
merely an attempt to reduce closer to first prin- 
ciples the nature of this institution in the shadow 
of which we all live, move and have our being. 
Ethnologists are generally agreed that human so- 
ciety made its first appearance as the human pack 
and not as a collection of individuals or of couples. 
The herd is in fact the original unit, and only as 
it was differentiated did personal individuality 
develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes 
of men are shown to live in a very complex but 
very rigid social organization where opportunity 
for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes 
remain strictly organized herds, and the difference 

[i 4 8] 



between them and the modern State is one of de- 
gree of sophistication and variety of organization, 
and not of kind. 

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse 
as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps 
together the herds of the different species of higher 
animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pug- 
nacious evolutionary history has prevented the im- 
pulse from ever dying out. This gregarious 
impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to 
coalesce together, and is most powerful when the 
herd believes itself threatened with attack. 
Animals crowd together for protection, and men 
become most conscious of their collectivity at the 
threat of war. Consciousness of collectivity 
brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, 
which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is 
on. In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts 
not only to produce concerted action for defense, 
but also to produce identity of opinion. Since 
thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious im- 
pulse floods up into its realms and demands that 
sense of uniform thought which wartime produces 
[H9] 



so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the 
conscious life of society that gregariousness works 
its havoc. 

For just as in modern societies the sex-instinct is 
enormously over-supplied for the requirements of 
human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is 
enormously over-supplied for the work of protec- 
tion which it is called upon to perform. It would 
be quite enough if we were gregarious enough to 
enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to 
cooperate with them, and to feel a slight malaise 
at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this im- 
pulse is not content with these reasonable and 
healthful demands, but insists that like-minded- 
ness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments 
of life. So that all human progress, all novelty, 
and non-conformity, must be carried against the 
resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which 
drives the individual into obedience and con- 
formity with the majority. Even in the most 
modern and enlightened societies this impulse 
shows little sign of abating. As it is driven by 
inexorable economic demand out of the sphere of 
utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely 

[150] 



in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that con- 
formity comes to be a thing aggressively desired 
and demanded. 

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the 
more virulently because when the group is in mo- 
tion or is taking any positive action, this feeling 
of being with and supported by the collective herd 
very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourish- 
ment of which the individual organism so con- 
stantly demands. You feel powerful by conform- 
ing, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you are 
out of the crowd. While even if you do not get 
any access of power by thinking and feeling just 
as everybody else in your group does, you get at 
least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing 
irresponsibility of protection. 

Joining as it does to these very vigorous ten- 
dencies of the individual — the pleasure in power 
and the pleasure in obedience — this gregarious 
impulse becomes irresistible in society. War 
stimulates it to the highest possible degree, send- 
ing the influences of its mysterious herd-current 
with its inflations of power and obedience to the 
farthest reaches of the society, to every individual 

[151] 



and little group that can possibly be affected. 
And it is these impulses which the State — the or- 
ganization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity 
— is founded on and makes use of. 
/ There is, of course, in the feeling towards the 
State a large element of pure filial mysticism. 
The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, 
sends one's desire back to the father and mother, 
with whom is associated the earliest feelings of 
protection. It is not for nothing that one's State 
is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that 
one's relation towards it is conceived in terms 
of family affection. The war has shown that 
nowhere under the shock of danger have these 
primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert them- 
selves again, as much in this country as anywhere. 
If we have not the intense Father-sense of the 
German who worships his Vaterland, at least in 
Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly 
authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the 
Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender 
functions of war service, the ruling organization 
is conceived in family terms. A people at war 
have become in the most literal sense obedient, 

[152] 



respectful, trustful children again, full of that 
naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the 
adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but 
necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose 
their responsibility and anxieties. In this recru- 
descence of the child, there is great comfort, and 
a certain influx of power. On most people the 
strain of being an independent adult weighs 
heavily, and upon none more than those members 
of the significant classes who have had bequeathed 
to them or have assumed the responsibilities of 
governing. The State provides the convenientest 
of symbols under which these classes can retain all 
the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but 
can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adult- 
hood. They continue to direct industry and gov- 
ernment and all the institutions of society pretty 
much as before, but in their own conscious eyes 
and in the eyes of the general public, they are 
turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and 
have become loyal servants of society, or some- 
thing greater than they — the State. The man 
who moves from the direction of a large business 
in New York to a post in the war management 

[153] 



industrial service in Washington does not 
apparently alter very much his power or his 
administrative technique. But psychically, what 
a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not 
only the power but the glory ! And his sense of 
satisfaction is directly proportional not to the 
genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may be 
involved in the change but to the extent to which 
he retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of 
command. 

From members of this class a certain insuperable 
indignation arises if the change from private 
enterprise to State service involves any real loss 
of power and personal privilege. If there is to be 
pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the 
field of honor, in the traditionally acclaimed 
deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as 
Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime sup- 
plies satisfaction for this very real craving, but its 
chief value is the opportunity it gives for this 
regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction 
to an imagined attack on your country or an insult 
to its government, you draw closer to the herd for 
protection, you conform in word and deed, and 

[154] 



you insist vehemently that everybody else shall 
think, speak and act together. And you fix your 
adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial 
look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi- 
personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and 
the leader and determinant of your definite action 
and ideas. 

The members of the working-classes, that por- 
tion at least which does not identify itself with 
the significant classes and seek to imitate it and 
rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the 
symbolism of the State, or, in other words, are 
less patriotic than the significant classes. For 
theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The 
State in wartime does not offer them the oppor- 
tunity to regress, for, never having acquired social 
adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been 
drilled and regimented, as by the industrial 
regime of the last century, they go out docilely 
enough to do battle for their State, but they are 
almost entirely without that filial sense and even 
without that herd-intellect sense which operates 
so powerfully among their "betters." They live 
habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which 

[155] 



though nominally free, they are in practice as a 
class bound to a system of machine-production 
the implements of which they do not own, and in 
the distribution of whose product they have not 
the slightest voice, except what they can occa- 
sionally exert by a veiled intimidation which 
draws slightly more of the product in their direc- 
tion. From such serfdom, military conscription 
is not so great a change. But into the military 
enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the 
significant classes whose instincts war so power- 
fully feeds, but with the same apathy with which 
they enter and continue in the industrial enter- 
prise. 

From this point of view, war can be called 
almost an upper-class sport. The novel interests 
and excitements it provides, the inflations of 
power, the satisfaction it gives to those very 
tenacious human impulses — gregariousness and 
parent-regression — endow it with all the qualities 
of a luxurious collective game which is felt in- 
tensely just in proportion to the sense of signifi- 
cant rule the person has in the class-division of 
his society. A country at war — particularly our 

[156] 



own country at war — does not act as a purely 
homogeneous herd. The significant classes have 
all the herd-feeling in all its primitive intensity, 
but there are barriers, or at least differentials of 
intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely 
without impediment throughout the entire nation. 
A modern country represents a long historical and 
social process of disaggregation of the herd. The 
nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of 
myriads of groups representing the cooperation 
and similar feeling of men on all sorts of planes 
and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. 
In every modern industrial country, there are 
parallel planes of economic classes with divergent 
attitudes and institutions and interests — bourgeois 
and proletariat, with their many subdivisions ac- 
cording to power and function, and even their 
interweaving, such as those more highly skilled 
workers who habitually identify themselves with 
the owning and the significant classes and strive 
to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitat- 
ing their cultural standards and manners. Then 
there are religious groups with a certain definite, 
though weakening sense of kinship, and there are 

[157] 



the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost 
as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging 
tenaciously to language and historical tradition, 
though their herdishness is usually founded on 
cultural rather than State symbols. There are 
even certain vague sectional groupings. All these 
small sects, political parties, classes, levels, in- 
terests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They 
intersect and interweave, and the same person may 
be a member of several different groups lying at 
different planes. Different occasions will set off 
his herd-feeling in one direction or another. In a 
religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the 
necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail; 
in a political campaign, that his party shall 
triumph. 

To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all 
these smaller herds offer resistance. To the 
spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the 
threat of war, and which would normally involve 
the entire nation, the only groups which make 
serious resistance are those, of course, which con- 
tinue to identify themselves with the other nation 
from which they or their parents have come. In 

[158] 



times of peace they are for all practical purposes 
citizens of their new country. They keep alive 
their ethnic traditions more as a luxury than any- 
thing. Indeed these traditions tend rapidly to 
die out except where they connect with some still 
unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some 
struggle for freedom, or some irredentism. If 
they are consciously opposed by a too invidious 
policy of Americanism, they tend to be strength- 
ened. And in time of war, these ethnic elements 
which have any traditional connection with the 
enemy, even though most of the individuals may 
have little real sympathy with the enemy's cause, 
are naturally lukewarm to the herd-feeling of the 
nation which goes back to State traditions in 
which they have no share. But to the natives 
imbued with State-feeling, any such resistance or 
apathy is intolerable. This herd-feeling, this 
newly awakened consciousness of the State, de- 
mands universality. The leaders of the signifi- 
cant classes, who feel most intensely this State- 
compulsion, demand a one hundred per cent. 
Americanism, among one hundred per cent, of the 
population. The State is a jealous God and will 

[159] 



brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade 
every one, and all feeling must be run into the 
stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism 
which is the traditional expression of the State 
herd-feeling. 

Thus arises conflict within the State. War 
becomes almost a sport between the hunters and 
the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within out- 
weighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the 
enemy without. The whole terrific force of the 
State is brought to bear against the heretics. The 
nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white 
terrorism is carried on by the Government against 
pacifists, Socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder un- 
official persecution against all persons or move- 
ments that can be imagined as connected with the 
enemy. War, which should be the health of the 
State, unifies all the bourgeois elements and the 
common people, and outlaws the rest. The 
revolutionary proletariat shows more resistance to 
this unification, is, as we have seen, psychically 
out of the current. Its vanguard, as the I. W. W., 
is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that 
it is a symptom, not a cause, and its prosecution 

[160] 






increases the disaffection of labor and intensifies 
the friction instead of lessening it. 

But the emotions that play around the defense 
of the State do not take into consideration the 
pragmatic results. A nation at war, led by its 
significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain 
of its impulses which have had all too little exer- 
cise in the past. It is getting certain satisfactions 
and the actual conduct of the war or the condition 
of the country are really incidental to the enjoy- 
ment of new forms of virtue and power and 
aggressiveness. If it could be shown conclusively 
that the persecution of slightly disaffected ele- 
ments actually increased enormously the difficul- 
ties of production and the organization of the war 
technique, it would be found that public policy 
would scarcely change. The significant classes 
must have their pleasure in hunting down and 
chastizing everything that they feel instinctively 
to be not imbued with the current State- 
enthusiasm, though the State itself be actually 
impeded in its efforts to carry out those objects 
for which they are passionately contending. The 
best proof of this is that with a pursuit of plotters 

[161] 



that has continued with ceaseless vigilance ever 
since the beginning of the war in Europe, the 
concrete crimes unearthed and punished have 
been fewer than those prosecutions for the mere 
crime of opinion or the expression of sentiments 
critical of the State or the national policy. The 
punishment for opinion has been far more fero- 
cious and unintermittent than the punishment of 
pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable Anglo-Saxon 
Americans who were freer of pacifist or socialist 
utterance than the State-obsessed ruling public 
opinion, received heavier penalties and even 
greater opprobrium, in many instances, than the 
definitely hostile German plotter. A public 
opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as 
just, adequate, beautiful, deserved and in fitting 
harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of 
speech, a sentence of twenty years in prison for 
mere utterances, no matter what they may be, 
shows itself to be suffering from a kind of social 
derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis, 
that deserves analysis and comprehension. 

On our entrance into the war, there were many 
persons who predicted exactly this derangement 

[162] 



of values, who feared lest democracy suffer more 
at home from an America at war than could be 
gained for democracy abroad. That fear has been 
amply justified. The question whether the 
American nation would act like an enlightened 
democracy going to war for the sake of high ideals, 
or like a State-obsessed herd, has been decisively 
answered. The record is written and cannot be 
erased. History will decide whether the terrori- 
zation of opinion, and the regimentation of life 
was justified under the most idealistic of demo- 
cratic administrations. It will see that when the 
American nation had ostensibly a chance to con- 
duct a gallant war, with scrupulous regard to the 
safety of democratic values at home, it chose 
rather to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive 
techniques of the enemy and of the other countries 
at war, and to rival in intimidation and ferocity 
of punishment the worst governmental systems of 
the age. For its former unconsciousness and dis- 
respect of the State ideal, the nation apparently 
paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other 
extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its 
irrational coercion of minorities that there is no 

[163] 



artificiality in interpreting the progress of the war 
in terms of the herd psychology. It unwittingly 
brought out into the strongest relief the true char- 
acteristics of the State and its intimate alliance 
with war. It provided for the enemies of war 
and the critics of the State the most telling argu- 
ments possible. The new passion for the State 
ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged 
forces that threaten very materially to reform the 
State. It has shown those who are really deter- 
mined to end war that the problem is not the 
mere simple one of finishing a war that will end 
war. 

For war is a complicated way in which a nation 
acts, and it acts so out of a spiritual compulsion 
which pushes it on, perhaps against all its interests, 
all its real desires, and all its real sense of values. 
It is States, that make wars and not nations, and 
the very thought and almost necessity of war is 
bound up with the ideal of the State. Not for 
centuries have nations made war; in fact the only 
historical example of nations making war is the 
great barbarian invasions into southern Europe, 
the invasions of Russia from the East, and per- 

[i6 4 ] 






haps the sweep of Islam through Northern Africa 
into Europe after Mohammed's death. And the 
motivations for such wars were either the restless 
expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of reli- 
gious fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements 
could scarcely be called wars at all, for war implies 
an organized people drilled and led; in fact, it 
necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had 
any such organization, such huge conflicts between 
nations — nations, that is, as cultural groups — 
have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to as- 
sume that for centuries in Europe there would 
have been any possibility of a people en masse, 
(with their own leaders, and not with the leaders 
of their duly constituted State), rising up and 
overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a 
neighboring people. The wars of the Revolu- 
tionary armies of France were clearly in defense 
of an imperiled freedom, and, moreover, they 
were clearly directed not against other peoples, 
but against the autocratic governments that were 
combining to crush the Revolution. There is 
no instance in history of a genuinely national 
war. There are instances of national defenses, 

[165] 



among primitive civilizations such as the Balkan 
peoples, against intolerable invasion by neighbor- 
ing despots or oppression. But war, as such, can- 
not occur except in a system of competing States, 
which have relations with each other through the 
channels of diplomacy. 

War is a function of this system of States, and 
could not occur except in such a system. Nations 
organized for internal administration, nations or- 
ganized as a federation of free communities, 
nations organized in any way except that of a 
political centralization of a dynasty, or the re- 
formed descendant of a dynasty, could not pos- 
sibly make war upon each other. They would not 
only have no motive for conflict, but they would 
be unable to muster the concentrated force to make 
war effective. There might be all sorts of 
amateur marauding, there might be guerilla ex- 
peditions of group against group, but there could 
not be that terrible war en masse of the national 
State, that exploitation of the nation in the in- 
terests of the State, that abuse of the national life 
and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide, which 
is modern war. 

[166] 



It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a 
function of States and not of nations, indeed that 
it is the chief function of States. War is a very 
artificial thing. It is not the naive spontaneous 
outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary 
than is formal religion. War cannot exist with- 
out a military establishment, and a military estab- 
lishment cannot exist without a State organization. 
War has an immemorial tradition and heredity 
only because the State has a long tradition and 
heredity. But they are inseparably and function- 
ally joined. We cannot crusade against war 
without crusading implicitly against the State. 
And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, 
that this war is a war to end war, unless at the 
same time we take measures to end the State in 
its traditional form. The State is not the nation, 
and the State can be modified and even abolished 
in its present form, without harming the nation. 
On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance 
of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of 
the nation will be liberated. If the State's chief 
function is war, then the State must suck out of 
the nation a large part of its energy for its purely 

[167] 



sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It de- 
votes to waste or to actual destruction as much 
as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one 
will deny that war is a vast complex of life- 
destroying and life-crippling forces. If the 
State's chief function is war, then it is chiefly 
concerned with coordinating and developing the 
powers and techniques which make for destruction. 
And this means not only the actual and potential 
destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at 
home as well. For the very existence of a State 
in a system of States means that the nation lies 
always under a risk of war and invasion, and the 
calling away of energy into military pursuits 
means a crippling of the productive and life- 
enhancing processes of the national life. 

All this organizing of death-dealing energy and 
technique is not a natural but a very sophisticated 
process. Particularly in modern nations, but also 
all through the course of modern European his- 
tory, it could never exist without the State. For 
it meets the demands of no other institution, it 
follows the desires of no religious, industrial, po- 
litical group. If the demand for military organi- 

[168] 



zation and a military establishment seems to come 
not from the officers of the State but from the 
public, it is only that it comes from the State- 
obsessed portion of the public, those groups which 
feel most keenly the State ideal. And in this 
country we have had evidence all too indubitable 
how powerless the pacifically minded officers of 
State may be in the face of a State-obsession of the 
significant classes. If a powerful section of the 
significant classes feels more intensely the attitudes 
of the State, then they will most infallibly mold 
the Government in time to their wishes, bring it 
back to act as the embodiment of the State which 
it pretends to be. In every country we have seen 
groups that were more loyal than the king — more 
patriotic than the Government — the Ulsterites in 
Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l'Action 
Franchise in France, our patrioteers in America. 
These groups exist to keep the steering wheel of 
the State straight, and they prevent the nation 
from ever veering very far from the State ideal. 

Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the 
major impulse only of this class. The other 
classes, left to themselves, have too many necessi- 

[169] 



ties and interests and ambitions, to concern them- 
selves with so expensive and destructive a game. 
But the State-obsessed group is either able to get 
control of the machinery of the State or to intimi- 
date those in control, so that it is able through use 
of the collective force to regiment the other grudg- 
ing and reluctant classes into a military pro- 
gramme. State idealism percolates down through 
the strata of society; capturing groups and in- 
dividuals just in proportion to the prestige of this 
dominant class. So that we have the herd 
actually strung along between two extremes, the 
militaristic patriots at one end, who are scarcely 
distinguishable in attitude and animus from the 
most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and un- 
skilled labor groups, which entirely lack the State 
sense. But the State acts as a whole, and the class 
that controls governmental machinery can swing 
the effective action of the herd as a whole. The 
herd is not actually a whole, emotionally. But 
by an ingenious mixture of cajolery, agitation, in- 
timidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an 
effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual 

[ 170] 



whole. Men are told simultaneously that they 
will enter the military establishment of their own 
volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their coun- 
try's welfare, and that if they do not enter they 
will be hunted down and punished with the most 
horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable 
confusion of democratic pride and personal fear 
they submit to the destruction of their livelihood 
if not their lives, in a way that would formerly 
have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be 
incredible. 

In this great herd-machinery, dissent is like 
sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily 
a sort of blind animal push towards military unity. 
Any interference with that unity turns the whole 
vast impulse towards crushing it. Dissent is 
speedily outlawed, and the Government, backed 
by the significant classes and those who in every 
locality, however small, identify themselves with 
them, proceeds against the outlaws, regardless of 
their value to the other institutions of the nation, 
or to the effect their persecution may have on 
public opinion. The herd becomes divided into 

[171] 



the hunters and the hunted, and war-enterprise 
becomes not only a technical game but a sport as 
well. 

It must never be forgotten that nations do not 
declare war on each other, nor in the strictest sense 
is it nations that fight each other. Much has been 
said to the effect that modern wars are wars of 
whole peoples and not of dynasties. Because the 
entire nation is regimented and the whole resources 
of the country are levied on for war, this does not 
mean that it is the country qua country which is 
fighting. It is the country organized as a State 
that is fighting, and only as a State would it pos- 
sibly fight. So, literally, it is States which make 
war on each other and not peoples. Governments 
are the agents of States, and it is Governments 
which declare war on each other, acting truest to 
form in the interests of the great State ideal they 
represent. There is no case known in modern 
times of the people being consulted in the initia- 
tion of a war. The present demand for demo- 
cratic control of foreign policy indicates how 
completely, even in the most democratic of modern 
nations, foreign policy has been the secret private 

[172] 



possession of the executive branch of the Govern- 
ment. 

However representative of the people Parlia- 
ments and Congresses may be in all that concerns 
the internal administration of a country's political 
affairs, in international relations it has never been 
possible to maintain that the popular body acted 
except as a wholly mechanical ratifier of the 
Executive's will. The formality by which Par- 
liaments and Congresses declare war is the merest 
technicality. Before such a declaration can take 
place, the country will have been brought to the 
very brink of war by the foreign policy of the 
Executive. A long series of steps on the down- 
ward path, each one more fatally committing the 
unsuspecting country to a warlike course of action 
will have been taken without either the people or 
its representatives being consulted or expressing 
its feeling. When the declaration of war is 
finally demanded by the Executive, the Parlia- 
ment or Congress could not refuse it without 
reversing the course of history, without repudiat- 
ing what has been representing itself in the eyes 
of the other States as the symbol and interpreter 

[ 173] 



of the nation's will and animus. To repudiate an 
Executive at that time would be to publish to the 
entire world the evidence that the country had 
been grossly deceived by its own Government, that 
the country with an almost criminal carelessness 
had allowed its Government to commit it to gigan- 
tic national enterprises in which it had no heart. 
In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the 
most democratic States represents the common man 
and not the significant classes who most strongly 
cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the 
foreign policy which it understands even less than 
it would care for if it understood, and will vote 
almost unanimously for an incalculable war, in 
which the nation may be brought well nigh to 
ruin. That is why the referendum which was ad- 
vocated by some people as a test of American senti- 
ment in entering the war was considered even by 
thoughtful democrats to be something subtly im- 
proper. The die had been cast. Popular whim 
could only derange and bungle monstrously the 
majestic march of State policy in its new crusade 
for the peace of the world. The irresistible State 
ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas 

[174] 



up to this time, it had been irreproachable to be 
neutral in word and deed, for the foreign policy of 
the State had so decided it, henceforth it became 
the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The 
Middle West, which had been soddenly pacifistic 
in our days of neutrality, became in a few months 
just as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for 
witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within 
gave precedence to no section of the country. The 
herd-mind followed faithfully the State-mind and, 
the agitation for a referendum being soon for- 
gotten, the country fell into the universal conclu- 
sion that, since its Congress had formally declared 
the war, the nation itself had in the most solemn 
and universal way devised and brought on the 
entire affair. Oppression of minorities became 
justified on the plea that the latter were perversely 
resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly 
declared will of a majority of the nation. The 
herd-coalescence of opinion which became inevit- 
able the moment the State had set flowing the war- 
attitudes became interpreted as a pre-war popular 
decision, and disinclination to bow to the herd was 
treated as a monstrously anti-social act. So that 

[175] 



the State, which had vigorously resisted the idea 
of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of 
course, with entire success to its autocratic and 
absolute control of foreign policy, had the pleasure 
of seeing the country, within a few months, given 
over to the retrospective impression that a genuine 
referendum had taken place. When once a 
country has lapped up these State attitudes, its 
memory fades; it conceives itself not as merely 
accepting, but of having itself willed the whole 
policy and technique of war. The significant 
classes with their trailing satellites, identify them- 
selves with the State, so that what the State, 
through the agency of the Government, has willed, 
this majority conceives itself to have willed. 

All of which goes to show that the State repre- 
sents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, 
belligerent forces within a social group, it is a 
sort of complexus of everything most distasteful 
to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. War 
is the health of the State. Only when the State 
is at war does the modern society function with 
that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic 

[176] 






devotion, cooperation of services, which have al- 
ways been the ideal of the State lover. With the 
ravages of democratic ideas, however, the modern 
republic cannot go to war under the old concep- 
tions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. 
If a successful animus for war requires a 
renaissance of State ideals, they can only come 
back under democratic forms, under this retro- 
spective conviction of democratic control of 
foreign policy, democratic desire for war, and par- 
ticularly of this identification of the democracy 
with the State. How unregenerate the ancient 
State may be, however, is indicated by the laws 
against sedition, and by the Government's uni- 
formed attitude on foreign policy. One of the 
first demands of the more far-seeing democrats in 
the democracies of the Alliance was that secret 
diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have 
been made possible by a web of secret agreements 
between States, alliances that were made by Gov- 
ernments without the shadow of popular support 
or even popular knowledge, and vague, half-under- 
stood commitments that scarcely reached the stage 
of a treaty or agreement, but which proved bind- 



ing in the event. Certainly, said these democratic 
thinkers, war can scarcely be avoided unless this 
poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy 
is destroyed, this system by which a nation's 
power, wealth and manhood may be signed away 
like a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed 
in at some future crisis. Agreements which are 
to affect the lives of whole peoples must be made 
between peoples and not by Governments, or at 
least by their representatives in the full glare of 
publicity and criticism. 

Such a demand for "democratic control of 
foreign policy" seemed axiomatic. Even if the 
country had been swung into war by steps taken 
secretly and announced to the public only after 
they had been consummated, it was felt that that 
attitude of the American State towards foreign 
policy was only a relic of the bad old days and 
must be superseded in the new order. The 
American President himself, the liberal hope of 
the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world, 
open diplomacy, agreements freely and openly 
arrived at. Did this mean a genuine transference 
of power in this most crucial of State functions 

[178] 



from Government to people? Not at all. 
When the question recently came to a challenge 
in Congress, and the implications of open discus- 
sion were somewhat specifically discussed, and the 
desirabilities frankly commended, the President let 
his disapproval be known in no uncertain way. 
No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a 
State idealist, and whenever democratic aspira- 
tions swung ideals too far out of the State orbit, 
he could be counted on to react vigorously. Here 
was a clear case of conflict between democratic 
idealism and the very crux of the concept of the 
State. However unthinkingly he might have 
been led on to encourage open diplomacy in his 
liberalizing programme, when its implication was 
made vivid to him, he betrayed how mere a tool 
the idea had been in his mind to accentuate 
America's redeeming role. Not in any sense as a 
serious pragmatic technique had he thought of a 
genuinely open diplomacy. And how could he? 
For the last stronghold of State power is foreign 
policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts 
most concentratedly as the organized herd, acts 
with fullest sense of aggressive power, acts with 

C 179] 



freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy, the State 
is most itself. States, with reference to each 
other, may be said to be in a continual state of 
latent war. The "armed truce," a phrase so 
familiar before 1914, was an accurate description 
of the normal relation of States when they are not 
at war. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the 
normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a 
disguised war, in which States seek to gain by 
barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the 
objectives which they would have to gain more 
clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used 
while the States are recuperating from conflicts 
in which they have exhausted themselves. It is 
the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out 
bullies as they rise from the ground and slowly 
restore their strength to begin fighting again. If 
diplomacy had been a moral equivalent for war, a 
higher stage in human progress, an inestimable 
means of making words prevail instead of blows, 
militarism would have broken down and given 
place to it. But since it is a mere temporary sub- 
stitute, a mere appearance of war's energy under 
another form, a surrogate effect is almost exactly 

[180] 



proportioned to the armed force behind it. When 
it fails, the recourse is immediate to the military 
technique whose thinly veiled arm it has been. A 
diplomacy that was the agency of popular demo- 
cratic forces in their non-State manifestations 
would be no diplomacy at all. It would be no 
better than the Railway or Education Commissions 
that are sent from one country to another with 
rational constructive purpose. The State, acting 
as a diplomatic-military ideal, is eternally at war. 
Just as it must act arbitrarily and autocratically 
in time of war, it must act in time of peace in 
this particular role where it acts as a unit. Uni- 
fied control is necessarily autocratic control. 
Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore 
a contradiction in terms. Open discussion de- 
stroys swiftness and certainty of action. The 
giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains his 
full ideal of the State at the same time that he 
desires to eliminate war. He wishes to make the 
world safe for democracy as well as safe for 
diplomacy. When the two are in conflict, his 
clear political insight, his idealism of the State, 
tells him that it is the naiver democratic values 

[181] 



that must be sacrificed. The world must pri- 
marily be made safe for diplomacy. The State 
must not be diminished. 

What is the State essentially? The more 
closely we examine it, the more mystical and per- 
sonal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our 
hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and 
qualities exact enough to mean something. On 
the Government we can put our hand as a certain 
organization of ruling functions, the machinery of 
law-making and law-enforcing. The Administra- 
tion is a recognizable group of political function- 
aries, temporarily in charge of the government. 
But the State stands as an idea behind them all, 
eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and 
Administration conceive themselves to have the 
breath of life. Even the nation, especially in 
times of war — or at least, its significant classes — 
considers that it derives its authority, and its pur- 
pose from the idea of the State. Nation and State 
are scarcely differentiated, and the concrete, prac- 
tical, apparent facts are sunk in the symbol. We 
reverence not our country but the flag. We may 
criticize ever so severely our country, but we are 

[182] 






.disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the 
flag and the uniform that make men's heart beat 
high and fill them with noble emotions, not the 
thought of and pious hopes for America as a free 
and enlightened nation. 

It cannot be said that the object of emotion is 
the same, because the flag is the symbol of the 
nation, so that in reverencing the American flag 
we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not 
a symbol of the country as a cultural group, fol- 
lowing certain ideals of life, but solely a symbol 
of the political State, inseparable from its prestige 
and expansion. The flag is most intimately 
connected with military achievement, military 
memory. It represents the country not in its 
intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the 
world. The flag is primarily the banner of war; 
it is allied with patriotic anthem and holiday. It 
recalls old martial memories. A nation's pa- 
triotic history is solely the history of its wars, that 
is, of the State in its health and glorious function- 
ing. So in responding to the appeal of the flag, 
we are responding to the appeal of the State, to 
the symbol of the herd organized as an offensive 

[183] 



and defensive body, conscious of its prowess and 
its mystical herd-strength. 

Even those authorities in the present Adminis- 
tration, to whom has been granted autocratic con- 
trol over opinion, feel, though they are scarcely 
able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has 
been authoritatively declared that the horrid 
penalties against seditious opinion must not be 
construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is, partisan 
criticism of the Administration. A distinction is 
made between the Administration and the Gov- 
ernment. It is quite accurately suggested by this 
attitude that the Administration is a temporary 
band of partisan politicians in charge of the 
machinery of Government, carrying out the 
mystical policies of State. The manner in which 
they operate this machinery may be freely dis- 
cussed and objected to by their political oppon- 
ents. The Governmental machinery may also be 
legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What 
may not be discussed or criticized is the mystical 
policy itself or the motives of the State in in- 
augurating such a policy. The President, it is 
true, has made certain partisan distinctions be- 

[i8 4 ] 



tween candidates for office on the ground of sup- 
port or non-support of the Administration, but 
what he meant was really support or non-support 
of the State policy as faithfully carried out by the 
Administration. Certain of the Administration 
measures were devised directly to increase the 
health of the State, such as the Conscription and 
the Espionage laws. Others were concerned 
merely with the machinery. To oppose the first 
was to oppose the State and was therefore not 
tolerable. To oppose the second was to oppose 
fallible human judgment, and was therefore, 
though to be deprecated, not to be wholly inter- 
preted as political suicide. 

The distinction between Government and 
State, however, has not been so carefully observed. 
In time of war it is natural that Government as 
the seat of authority should be confused with the 
State or the mystic source of authority. You can- 
not very well injure a mystical idea which is the 
State, but you can very well interfere with the 
processes of Government. So that the two be- 
come identified in the public mind, and any con- 
tempt for or opposition to the workings of the 

[185] 



machinery of Government is considered equivalent 
to contempt for the sacred State. The State, it 
is felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, 
and public emotion rallies passionately to defend 
it. It even makes any criticism of the form of 
Government a crime. 
yS The inextricable union of militarism and the 
State is beautifully shown by those laws which 
emphasize interference with the Army and Navy 
as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Prag- 
matically, a case of capitalistic sabotage, or a 
strike in war industry would seem to be far more 
dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war 
than the isolated and ineffectual efforts of an in- 
dividual to prevent recruiting. But in the tradi- 
tion of the State ideal, such industrial interference 
with national policy is not identified as a crime 
against the State. It may be grumbled against; 
it may be seen quite rationally as an impediment 
of the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those 
obscure seats of the herd-mind which dictate the 
identity of crime and fix their proportional punish- 
ments. Army and Navy, however, are the very 
arms of the State; in them flows its most precious 

[186] 



life-blood. To paralyze them is to touch the very 
State itself. And the majesty of the State is so 
sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a 
crime equal to a successful stroke. The will is 
deemed sufficient. Even though the individual in 
his effort to impede recruiting should utterly and 
lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. 
Let the wrath of the State descend upon him for 
his impiety! Even if he does not try any overt 
action, but merely utters sentiments that may in- 
cidentally in the most indirect way cause some one 
to refrain from enlisting, he is guilty. The 
guardians of the State do not ask whether any 
pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or 
desire. It is enough that the will is present. 
Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed 
too much for such sacrilege. 

Such attitudes and such laws, which affront 
every principle of human reason, are no accident, 
nor are they the result of hysteria caused by the 
war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful 
by all the classes which have the State ideal, and 
they express only an extreme of health and vigor 
in the reaction of the State to its non-friends. 

[187] 



Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the 
devotees of the State. For the State is a per- 
sonal as well as a mystical symbol, and it can only 
be understood by tracing its historical origin. 
The modern State is not the national and intelli- 
gent product of modern men desiring to live har- 
moniously together with security of life, property 
and opinion. It is not an organization which has 
been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social 
end. All the idealism with which we have been 
instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our 
retrospective imaginations. What it does for us 
in the way of security and benefit of life, it does 
incidentally as a by-product and development of 
its original functions, and not because at any time 
men or classes in the full possession of their insight 
and intelligence have desired that it be so. It is 
very important that we should occasionally lift 
the incorrigible veil of that ex post facto idealism 
by which we throw a glamor of rationalization 
over what is, and pretend in the ecstasies of social 
conceit that we have personally invented and set 
up for the glory of God and man the hoary institu- 
tions which we see around us. Things are what 

[188] 



they are, and come down to us with all their thick 
encrustations of error and malevolence. Political 
philosophy can delight us with fantasy and con- 
vince us who need illusion to live that the actual 
is a fair and approximate copy — full of failings, of 
course, but approximately sound and sincere — of 
that ideal society which we can imagine ourselves 
as creating. From this it is a step to the tacit 
assumption that we have somehow had a hand in 
its creation and are responsible for its maintenance 
and sanctity. 

Nothing is more obvious, however, than that 
every one of us comes into society as into some- 
thing in whose creation we had not the slightest 
hand. We have not even the advantage of con- 
sciousness before we take up our careers on earth. 
By the time we find ourselves here we are caught 
in a network of customs and attitudes, the major 
directions of our desires and interests have been 
stamped on our minds, and by the time we have 
emerged from tutelage and reached the years of 
discretion when we might conceivably throw our 
influence to the reshaping of social institutions, 
most of us have been so molded into the society 

[1893 



and class we live in that we are scarcely aware 
of any distinction between ourselves as judging, 
desiring individuals and our social environment. 
We have been kneaded so successfully that we ap- 
prove of what our society approves, desire what 
our society desires, and add to the group our own 
passional inertia against change, against the effort 
of reason, and the adventure of beauty. 

Every one of us, without exception, is born into 
a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora 
of our environment are given. Society and its 
institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as 
much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather 
itself. There is therefore, no natural sanctity in 
the State any more than there is in the weather. 
We may bow down before it, just as our an- 
cestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is 
only because something in us unregenerate finds 
satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there 
is anything inherently reverential in the institution 
worshipped. Once the State has begun to func- 
tion, and a large class finds its interest and its 
expression of power in maintaining the State, this 
ruling class may compel obedience from any un- 
[190] 



interested minority. The State thus becomes an 
instrument by which the power of the whole herd 
is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers 
soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the 
State produces in the majority, and turn it into a 
general resistance towards a lessening of their 
privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes 
identified with the sanctity of the ruling class and 
the latter are permitted to remain in power under 
the impression that in obeying and serving them, 
we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the 
great collectivity of all of us. 

An analysis of the State would take us back to 
the beginnings of society, to the complex of re- 
ligious and personal and herd-impulses which has 
found expression in so many forms. What we 
are interested in is the American State as it be- 
haves and as Americans behave towards it in this 
twentieth century, and to understand that, we have 
to go no further back than the early English 
monarchy of which our American republic is the 
direct descendant. How straight and true is that 
line of descent almost nobody realizes. Those 
persons who believe in the sharpest distinction be- 

[191] 



tween democracy and monarchy can scarcely ap- 
preciate how a political institution may go through 
so many transformations and yet remain the same. 
Yet a swift glance must show us that in all the 
evolution of the English monarchy, with all its 
broadenings and its revolutions, and even with its 
jump across the sea into a colony which became 
an independent nation and then a powerful State, 
the same State functions and attitudes have been 
preserved essentially unchanged. The changes 
have been changes of form and not of inner spirit, 
and the boasted extension of democracy has been 
not a process by which the State was essentially 
altered to meet the shifting of classes, the exten- 
sion of knowledge, the needs of social organiza- 
tion, but a mere elastic expansion by which the old 
spirit of the State easily absorbed the new and 
adjusted itself successfully to its exigencies. 
Never once has it been seriously shaken. Only 
once or twice has it been seriously challenged, and 
each time it has speedily recovered its equilibrium 
and proceeded with all its attitudes and faiths 
reenforced by the disturbance. 

The modern democratic State, in this light, is 

[192] 



therefore no bright and rational creation of a new 
day, the political form under which great peoples 
are to live healthfully and freely in a modern 
world, but the last decrepit scion of an ancient and 
hoary stock, which has become so exhausted that 
it scarcely recognizes its own ancestor, does, in fact 
repudiate him while it clings tenaciously to the 
archaic and irrelevant spirit that made that an- 
cestor powerful, and resists the new bottles for 
the new wine that its health as a modern society so 
desperately needs. So sweeping a conclusion 
might have been doubted concerning the American 
State had it not been for the war, which has pro- 
vided a long and beautiful series of examples of 
the tenacity of the State ideal and its hold on the 
significant classes of the American nation. War 
is the health of the State, and it is during war 
that one best understands the nature of that insti- 
tution. If the American democracy during war- 
time has acted with an almost incredible trueness 
to form, if it has resurrected with an almost joyful 
fury the somnolent State, we can only conclude 
that that tradition from the past has been un- 
broken, and that the American republic is the 

[ 193] 



direct descendant of the early English State. 
And what was the nature of this early English 
State 4 ? It was first of all a mediaeval absolute 
monarchy, arising out of the feudal chaos, which 
had represented the first effort at order after the 
turbulent assimilation of the invading barbarians 
by the Christianizing Roman civilization. The 
feudal lord evolved out of the invading warrior 
who had seized or been granted land and held it, 
souls and usufruct thereof, as fief to some higher 
lord whom he aided in war. His own serfs and 
vassals were exchanging faithful service for the 
protection which the warrior with his organized 
band could give them. Where one invading 
chieftain retained his power over his lesser lieu- 
tenants, a petty kingdom would arise, as in 
England, and a restless and ambitious king might 
extend his power over his neighbors and consoli- 
date the petty kingdoms only to fall before the 
armed power of an invader like William the Con- 
queror, who would bring the whole realm under 
his heel. The modern State begins when a prince 
secures almost undisputed sway over fairly 
homogeneous territory and people and strives to 
[ 194] 



fortify his power and maintain the order that will 
conduce to the safety and influence of his heirs. 
The State in its inception is pure and undiluted 
monarchy; it is armed power, culminating in a 
single head, bent on one primary object, the re- 
ducing to subjection, to unconditional and un- 
qualified loyalty of all the people of a certain 
territory. This is the primary striving of the 
State, and it is a striving that the State never 
loses, through all its myriad transformations. 

When this subjugation was once acquired, the 
modern State had begun. In the King, the sub- 
jects found their protection and their sense of 
unity. From his side, he was a redoubtable, am- 
bitious, and stiff-necked warrior, getting the su- 
preme mastery which he craved. But from theirs, 
he was a symbol of the herd, the visible emblem 
of that security which they needed and for which 
they drew gregariously together. Serfs and vil- 
lains, whose safety under their petty lords had 
been rudely shattered in the constant conflicts for 
supremacy, now drew a new breath under the 
supremacy, that wiped out all this local anarchy. 
King and people agreed in the thirst for order, and 

[195] 



order became the first healing function of the 
State. But in the maintenance of order, the King 
needed officers of justice; the old crude group-rules 
for dispensing justice had to be codified, a system 
of formal law worked out. The King needed 
ministers, who would carry out his will, extensions 
of his own power, as a machine extends the power 
of a man's hand. So the State grew as a gradual 
differentiation of the King's absolute power, 
founded on the devotion of his subjects and his 
control of a military band, swift and sure to smite. 
Gratitude for protection and fear of the strong 
arm sufficed to produce the loyalty of the country 
to the State. 

The history of the State, then, is the effort to 
maintain these personal prerogatives of power, the 
effort to convert more and more into stable law tfre 
rules of order, the conditions of public vengeance, 
the distinction between classes, the possession of 
privilege. It was an effort to convert what was 
at first arbitrary usurpation, a perfectly apparent 
use of unjustified force, into the taken for granted 
and the divinely established. The State moves 
inevitably along the line from military dictator- 

[196] 



ship to the divine right of Kings. What had to 
be at first rawly imposed becomes through social 
habit to seem the necessary, the inevitable. The 
modern unquestioning acceptance of the State 
comes out of long and turbulent centuries when 
the State was challenged and had to fight its way 
to prevail. The King's establishment of personal 
power — which was the early State — had to con- 
tend with the impudence of hostile barons, who 
saw too clearly the adventitious origin of the 
monarchy and felt no reason why they should not 
themselves reign. Feuds between the King and 
his relatives, quarrels over inheritance, quarrels 
over the devolution of property, threatened con- 
stantly the existence of the new monarchial State. 
The King's will to power necessitated for its abso- 
lute satisfaction universality of political control in 
his dominions, just as the Roman Church claimed 
universality of spiritual control over the whole 
world. And just as rival popes were the inevit- 
able product of such a pretension of sovereignty, 
rival kings and princes contended for that dazzling 
jewel of undisputed power. 

Not until the Tudor regime was there in Eng- 
[197] 



land an irresponsible absolute personal monarchy 
on the lines of the early State ideal, governing a 
fairly well-organized and prosperous nation. The 
Stuarts were not only too weak-minded to inherit 
this fruition of William the Conqueror's labors, 
but they made the fatal mistake of bringing out 
to public view and philosophy the idea of Divine 
Right implicit in the State, and this at a time 
when a new class of country gentry and burghers 
were attaining wealth and self-consciousness 
backed by the zeal of a theocratic and individual- 
istic religion. Cromwell might certainly, if he 
had continued in power, revised the ideal of the 
State, perhaps utterly transformed it, destroying 
the concepts of personal power, and universal 
sovereignty, and substituting a sort of Government 
of Presbyterian Soviets under the tutelage of a 
celestial Czar. But the Restoration brought back 
the old State under a peculiarly frivolous form. 
The Revolution was the merest change of 
monarchs at the behest of a Protestant majority 
which insisted on guarantees against religious 
relapse. The intrinsic nature of the monarchy as 
the symbol of the State was not in the least al- 

[i 9 8] 



tered. In place of the inept monarch who could 
not lead the State in person or concentrate in him- 
self the royal prerogatives, a coterie of courtiers 
managed the State. But their direction was con- 
sistently in the interest of the monarch and of the 
traditional ideal, so that the current of the English 
State was not broken. 

The boasted English Parliament of lords and 
commoners possessed at no time any vitality which 
weakened or threatened to weaken the State ideal. 
Its original purpose was merely to facilitate the 
raising of the King's revenues. The nobles re- 
sponded better when they seemed to be giving their 
consent. Their share in actual government was 
subjective, but the existence of Parliament served 
to appease any restiveness at the autocracy of the 
King. The significant classes could scarcely rebel 
when they had the privilege of giving consent to 
the King's measures. There was always outlet 
for the rebellious spirit of a powerful lord in pri- 
vate revolt against the King. The only Parlia- 
ment that seriously tried to govern outside of and 
against the King's will precipitated a civil war 
that ended with the effectual submission of Parlia- 

[ 199] 



merit in a more careless and corrupt autocracy than 
had yet been known. By the time of George III 
Parliament was moribund, utterly unrepresenta- 
tive either of the new bourgeois classes or of 
peasants and laborers, a mere frivolous parody of 
a legislature, despised both by King and people. 
The King was most effectively the State and his 
ministers the Government, which was run in terms 
of his personal whim, by men whose only interest 
was personal intrigue. Government had been for 
long what it has never ceased to be — a series of 
berths and emoluments in Army, Navy and the 
different departments of State, for the representa- 
tives of the privileged classes. 

The State of George III was an example of the 
most archaic ideal of the English State, the pure, 
personal monarchy. The great mass of the people 
had fallen into the age-long tradition of loyalty 
to the crown. The classes that might have been 
restive for political power were placated by a 
show of representative government and the lucra- 
tive supply of offices. Discontent showed itself 
only in those few enlightened elements which 
could not refrain from irony at the sheer irration- 
[ 200 ] 



ality of a State managed on the old heroic lines for 
so grotesque a sovereign and by so grotesque a 
succession of courtier-ministers. Such discontent 
could by no means muster sufficient force for a 
revolution, but the Revolution which was due 
came in America where even the very obviously 
shadowy pigment of Parliamentary representation 
was denied the colonists. All that was vital in 
the political thought of England supported the 
American colonists in their resistance to the 
obnoxious government of George III. 

The American Revolution began with certain 
latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break 
with the State ideal. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence announced doctrines that were utterly 
incompatible not only with the century-old con- 
ception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also 
with the Divine Right of the State. If all gov- 
ernments derive their authority from the consent 
of the governed, and if a people is entitled, at any 
time that it becomes oppressive, to overthrow it and 
institute one more nearly conformable to their in- 
terests and ideals, the old idea of the sovereignty 
of the State is destroyed. The State is reduced to 
[201] 



the homely work of an instrument for carrying out 
popular policies. If revolution is justifiable a 
State may be even criminal sometimes in resisting 
its own extinction. The sovereignty of the people 
is no mere phrase. It is a direct challenge to 
the historic tradition of the State. For it im- 
plies that the ultimate sanctity resides not in the 
State at all or in its agent, the government, but in 
the nation, that is, in the country viewed as a 
cultural group and not specifically as a king- 
dominated herd. The State then becomes a mere 
instrument, the servant of this popular will, or of 
the constructive needs of the cultural group. The 
Revolution had in it, therefore, the makings of a 
very daring modern experiment — the founding of 
a free nation which should use the State to effect 
its vast purposes of subduing a continent just as 
the colonists' armies had used arms to detach their 
society from the irresponsible rule of an overseas 
king and his frivolous ministers. The history of 
the State might have ended in 1776 as far as the 
American colonies were concerned, and the modern 
nation which is still striving to materialize itself 
have been born. 

[202 ] 



For awhile it seemed almost as if the State was 
dead. But men who are freed rarely know what 
to do with their liberty. In each colony the fatal 
seed of the State had been sown ; it could not dis- 
appear. Rival prestiges and interests began to 
make themselves felt. Fear of foreign States, 
economic distress, discord between classes, the in- 
evitable physical exhaustion and prostration of 
idealism which follows a protracted war — all com- 
bined to put the responsible classes of the new 
States into the mood for a regression to the State 
ideal. Ostensibly there is no reason why the mere 
lack of a centralized State should have destroyed 
the possibility of progress in the new liberated 
America, provided the inter-state jealousy and 
rivalry could have been destroyed. But there 
were no leaders for this anti-State nationalism. 
The sentiments of the Declaration remained mere 
sentiments. No constructive political scheme was 
built on them. The State ideal, on the other 
hand, had ambitious leaders of the financial 
classes, who saw in the excessive decentralization 
of the Confederation too much opportunity for the 
control of society by the democratic lower-class 
[203] 



elements. They were menaced by imperialistic 
powers without and by democracy within. 
Through their fear of the former they tended to 
exaggerate the impossibility of the latter. There 
was no inclination to make the new State a school 
where democratic experiments could be worked out 
as they should be. They were unwilling to give 
reconstruction the term that might have been 
necessary to build up this truly democratic 
nationalism. Six years is a short time to recon- 
struct an agricultural country devastated by a six 
years' war. The popular elements in the new 
States had time only to show their turbulence; 
they were given no time to grow. The ambitious 
leaders of the financial classes got a convention 
called to discuss the controversies and maladjust- 
ments of the States, which were making them 
clamor for a revision of the Articles of Confedera- 
tion, and then, by one of the most successful coups 
d'etat in history, turned their assembly into the 
manufacture of a new government on the strongest 
lines of the old State ideal. 

This new constitution, manufactured in secret 
session by the leaders of the propertied and ruling 
[204] 



classes, was then submitted to an approval of the 
electors which only by the most expert manipula- 
tion was obtained, but which was sufficient to over- 
ride the indignant undercurrent of protest from 
those popular elements who saw the fruits of the 
Revolution slipping away from them. Universal 
suffrage would have killed it forever. Had the 
liberated colonies had the advantage of the French 
experience before them, the promulgation of the 
Constitution would undoubtedly have been fol- 
lowed by a new revolution, as very nearly hap- 
pened later against Washington and the Federal- 
ists. But the ironical ineptitude of Fate put the 
machinery of the new Federalist constitutional 
government in operation just at the moment that 
the French Revolution began, and by the time 
those great waves of Jacobin feeling reached 
North America, the new Federalist" State was 
firmly enough on its course to weather the gale 
and the turmoil. 

The new State was therefore not the happy po- 
litical symbol of a united people, who in order to 
form a more perfect union, etc., but the imposition 
of a State on a loose and growing nationalism, 

[205] 



which was in a condition of unstable equilibrium 
and needed perhaps only to be fertilized from 
abroad to develop a genuine political experiment 
in democracy. The preamble to the Constitution, 
as was soon shown in the hostile popular vote and 
later in the revolt against the Federalists, was a 
pious hope rather than actuality, a blessedness 
to be realized when by the force of government 
pressure, the creation of idealism, and mere social 
habit, the population should be welded and 
kneaded into a State. That this is what has ac- 
tually happened, is seen in the fact that the some- 
what shockingly undemocratic origins of the 
American State have been almost completely 
glossed over and the unveiling is bitterly resented, 
by none so bitterly as the significant classes who 
have been most industrious in cultivating patriotic 
myth and legend. American history, as far as it 
has entered into the general popular emotion, runs 
along this line: The Colonies are freed by the 
Revolution from a tyrannous King and become 
free and independent States; there follow six 
years of impotent peace, during which the Col- 
onies quarrel among themselves and reveal the 
[206] 



hopeless weakness of the principle under which 
they are working together; in desperation the peo- 
ple then create a new instrument, and launch a 
free and democratic republic, which was and re- 
mains — especially since it withstood the shock of 
civil war — the most perfect form of democratic 
government known to man, perfectly adequate to 
be promulgated as an example in the twentieth 
century to all people, and to be spread by propa- 
ganda, and, if necessary, the sword, in all unregen- 
erately Imperial regions. Modern historians re- 
veal the avowedly undemocratic personnel and 
opinions of the Convention. They show that the 
members not only had an unconscious economic in- 
terest but a frank political interest in founding a 
State which should protect the propertied classes 
against the hostility of the people. They show 
how, from one point of view, the new government 
became almost a mechanism for overcoming the 
repudiation of debts, for putting back into their 
place a farmer and small trader class whom the 
unsettled times of reconstruction had threatened 
to liberate, for reestablishing on the securest basis 
of the sanctity of property and the State, their 
[207] 



class-supremacy menaced by a democracy that had 
drunk too deeply at the fount of Revolution. But 
all this makes little impression on the other legend 
of the popular mind, because it disturbs the sense 
of the sanctity of the State and it is this rock to 
which the herd-wish must cling. 

Every little school boy is trained to recite the 
weaknesses and inefficiencies of the Articles of 
Confederation. It is taken as axiomatic that un- 
der them the new nation was falling into anarchy 
and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of 
the Convention. These hapless articles have had 
to bear the infamy cast upon the untried by the 
radiantly successful. The nation had to be strong 
to repel invasion, strong to pay to the last loved 
copper penny the debts of the propertied and the 
provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied 
and improvident from ever using the government 
to ensure their own prosperity at the expense of 
moneyed capital. Under the Articles the new 
States were obviously trying to reconstruct them- 
selves in an alarming tenderness for the common 
man impoverished by the war. No one suggests 
that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore 
[208] 



unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of 
the Articles and labored so weightily over a new 
instrument not because the nation was failing un- 
der the Articles but because it was succeeding only 
too well. Without intervention from the leaders, 
reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new 
nation into an agrarian and proletarian democ- 
racy. It is impossible to predict what would have 
been worked out in time, whether the democratic 
idealism implicit in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence would have materialized into a form of so- 
ciety very much modified from the ancient State. 
All we know is that at a time when the current 
of political progress was in the direction of agra- 
rian and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to 
it gripped the nation and imposed upon it a power- 
ful form against which it was never to succeed in 
doing more than blindly struggle. The liberating 
virus of the Revolution was definitely expunged, 
and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work 
against the State, in opposition to the armed and 
respectable power of the nation. 

The propertied classes, seated firmly in the sad- 
dle by their Constitutional coup d'etat, have, of 
[209] 



course, never lost their ascendancy. The partic- 
ular group of Federalists who had engineered the 
new machinery and enjoyed the privilege of set- 
ting it in motion, were turned out in a dozen years 
by the "Jeffersonian democracy" whom their man- 
ner had so deeply offended. But the Jeffersonian 
democracy never meant in practice any more than 
the substitution of the rule of the country gen- 
tleman for the rule of the town capitalist. The 
true hostility between their interests was small as 
compared with the hostility of both towards the 
common man. When both were swept away by 
the irruption of the Western democracy under An- 
drew Jackson and the rule of the common man 
appeared for awhile in its least desirable forms, 
it was comparatively easy for the two propertied 
classes to form a tacit coalition against them. 
The new West achieved an extension of suffrage 
and a jovial sense of having come politically into 
its own, but the rule of the ancient classes was not 
seriously challenged. Their squabbles over the 
tariff were family affairs, for the tariff could not 
materially affect the common man of either East 
or West. The Eastern and Northern capitalists 
[210] 



soon saw the advantage of supporting Southern 
country gentleman slave-power as against the free- 
soil pioneer. Bad generalship on the part of this 
coalition allowed a Western free-soil minority 
President to slip into office and brought on the 
Civil War, which smashed the slave power and 
left Northern capital in undisputed possession of 
a field against which the pioneer could make only 
sporadic and ineffective revolts. 

From the Civil War to the death of Mark 
Hanna, the propertied capitalist industrial classes 
ran a triumphal career in possession of the State. 
At various times, as in 1896, the country had to 
be saved for them from disillusioned, rebellious 
hordes of small farmers and traders and demo- 
cratic idealists, who had in the overflow of pros- 
perity been squeezed down into the small end of 
the horn. But except for these occasional men- 
aces, business, that is to say, aggressive expansion- 
ist capitalism, had nearly forty years in which to 
direct the American republic as a private preserve, 
or laboratory, experimenting, developing, wasting, 
subjugating, to its heart's content, in the midst of 
a vast somnolence of complacency such as has 

[211] 



never been seen and contrasts strangely with the 
spiritual dissent and constructive revolutionary 
thought which went on at the same time in Eng- 
land and the Continent. 

That era ended in 1904 like the crack of doom, 
which woke a whole people into a modern day 
which they had far overslept, and for which they 
had no guiding principles or philosophy to conduct 
them about. They suddenly became acutely and 
painfully aware of the evils of the society in which 
they had slumbered and they snatched at one after 
the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to 
uplift them out of the slough in which they had 
slept. The glory of those shining figures — cap- 
tains of industry — went out in a sulphuric gloom. 
The head of the State, who made up in dogmatism 
what he lacked in philosophy, increased the con- 
fusion by reviving the Ten Commandments for po- 
litical purposes, and belaboring the wicked with 
them. The American world tossed in a state of 
doubt, of reawakened social conscience, of prag- 
matic effort for the salvation of society. The rul- 
ing classes — annoyed, bewildered, harassed — pre- 
tended with much bemoaning that they were losing 
[212] 



their grip on the State. Their inspired prophets 
uttered solemn warnings against political novelty 
and the abandonment of the tried and tested fruits 
of experience. 

These classes actually had little to fear. A po- 
litical system which had been founded in the inter- 
ests of property by their own spiritual and eco- 
nomic ancestors, which had become ingrained in 
the country's life through a function of 120 years, 
which was buttressed by a legal system which went 
back without a break to the early English mon- 
archy was not likely to crumble before the anger 
of a few muck-rakers, the disillusionment of a few 
radical sociologists, or the assaults of proletarian 
minorities. Those who bided their time through 
the Taft interregnum, which merely continued the 
Presidency until there could be found a statesman 
to fill it, were rewarded by the appearance of the 
exigency of a war, in which business organization 
was imperatively needed. They were thus able 
to make a neat and almost noiseless coalition with 
the Government. The mass of the worried mid- 
dle-classes, riddled by the campaign against Amer- 
ican failings, which at times extended almost to a 

[213] 



skepticism of the American State itself, were only 
too glad to sink back to a glorification of the State 
ideal, to feel about them in war, the old protect- 
ing arms, to return to the old primitive robust 
sense of the omnipotence of the State, its match- 
less virtue, honor and beauty, driving away all the 
foul old doubts and dismays. 

That the same class which imposed its constitu- 
tion on the nascent proletarian and agrarian de- 
mocracy has maintained itself to this day indicates 
how slight was the real effect of the Revolution. 
When that political change was consolidated in 
the new government, it was found that there had 
been a mere transfer of ruling-class power across 
the seas, or rather that a ruling commercial class 
in the colonies had been able to remove through 
a war fought largely by the masses a vexatious 
over-lordship of the" irresponsible coterie of minis- 
ters that surrounded George III. The colonies 
merely exchanged a system run in the interest of 
the overseas trade of English wealth for a system 
run in the interest of New England and Philadel- 
phia merchanthood, and later of Southern slavoc- 
racy. The daring innovation of getting rid of 
[214] 



a king and setting up a kingless State did not ap- 
parently impress the hard headed farmers and 
small traders with as much force as it has their 
patriotic defenders. The animus of the Conven- 
tion was so obviously monarchical that any exec- 
utive they devised could be only a very thinly dis- 
guised king. The compromise by which the presi- 
dency was created proved but to be the means by 
which very nearly the whole mass of traditional 
royal prerogatives was brought over and lodged in 
the new State. 

The President is an elected king, but the fact 
that he is elected has proved to be of far less sig- 
nificance in the course of political evolution than 
the fact that he is pragmatically a king. It was 
the intention of the founders of the Constitution 
that he be elected by a small body of notables, rep- 
resenting the ruling propertied classes, who could 
check him up every four years in a new election. 
This was no innovation. Kings have often been 
selected in this way in European history, and the 
Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election. 
That the American President's term was limited 
merely shows the confidence which the founders 
[215] 



felt in the buttressing force of their instrument. 
His election would never pass out of the hands of 
the notables, and so the office would be guaranteed 
to be held by a faithful representative of upper- 
class demands. What he was most obviously to 
represent was the interests of that body which 
elected him, and not the mass of the people who 
were still disfranchised. For the new State 
started with no Quixotic belief in universal suf- 
frage. The property qualifications which were in 
effect in every colony were continued. Govern- 
ment was frankly a function of those who held a 
concrete interest in the public weal, in the shape of 
visible property. The responsibility for the se- 
curity of property rights could safely lie only with 
those who had something to secure. The "stake" 
in the commonwealth which those who held office 
must possess was obviously larger. 

One of the larger errors of political insight 
which the sage founders of the Constitution com- 
mitted was to assume that the enfranchised watch- 
dogs of property and the public order would re- 
main a homogeneous class. Washington, acting 
strictly as the mouthpiece of the unified State 

[216] 



ideal, deprecated the growth of parties and of fac- 
tions which horridly keep the State in turbulence 
or threaten to rend it asunder. But the monarchi- 
cal and repressive policies of Washington's own 
friends promptly generated an opposition demo- 
cratic party representing the landed interests of 
the ruling classes, and the party system was fast- 
ened on the country. By the time the electorate 
had succeeded in reducing the electoral college to a 
mere recorder of the popular vote, or in other 
words, had broadened the class of notables to the 
whole property-holding electorate, the parties were 
firmly established to carry on the selective and re- 
fining and securing work of the electoral college. 
The party leadership then became, and has re- 
mained ever since, the nucleus of notables who de- 
termine the presidency. The electorate having 
won an apparently democratic victory in the de- 
struction of the notables, finds itself reduced to 
the role of mere ratification or selection between 
two or three candidates, in whose choice they have 
only a nominal share. The electoral college 
which stood between even the propertied elector- 
ate and the executive with the prerogatives of a 

[217] 



king, gave place to a body which was just as 
genuinely a bar to democratic expression, and far 
less responsible for its acts. The nucleus of party 
councils which became, after the reduction of the 
Electoral College, the real choosers of the Presi- 
dents, were unofficial, quasi-anonymous, utterly 
unchecked by the populace whose rulers they 
chose. More or less self-chosen, or chosen by lo- 
cal groups whom they dominated, they provided 
a far more secure guarantee that the State should 
remain in the hands of the ruling classes than the 
old electoral college. The party councils could 
be loosely organized entirely outside of the gov- 
ernmental organization, without oversight by the 
State or check from the electorate. They could 
be composed of the leaders of the propertied 
classes themselves or their lieutenants, who could 
retain their power indefinitely, or at least until 
they were unseated by rivals within the same 
charmed domain. They were at least entirely 
safe from attack by the officially constituted elec- 
torate, who, as the party system became more and 
more firmly established, found they could vote 
only on the slates set up for them by unknown 

[218] 



councils behind an imposing and all-powerful 
"Party." 

As soon as this system was organized into a 
hierarchy extending from national down to state 
and county politics, it became perfectly safe to 
broaden the electorate. The clamors of the un- 
propertied or the less propertied to share in the se- 
lection of their democratic republican government 
could be graciously acceded to without endanger- 
ing in the least the supremacy of those classes 
which the founders had meant to be supreme. 
The minority were now even more effectually pro- 
tected from the majority than under the old sys- 
tem, however indirect the election might be. The 
electorate was now reduced to a ratifier of slates, 
and as a ratifier of slates, or a chooser between two 
slates, both of which were pledged to upper-class 
domination, the electorate could have the freest, 
most universal suffrage, for any mass-desire for 
political change, any determined will to shift the 
class-balance, would be obliged to register itself 
through the party machinery. It could make no 
frontal attack on the Government. And the party 
machinery was directly devised to absorb and neu- 
[219] 



tralize this popular shock, handing out to the dis- 
gruntled electorate a disguised stone when it asked 
for political bread, and effectually smashing any 
third party which ever avariciously tried to reach 
government except through the regular two-party 
system. 

The party system succeeded, of course, beyond 
the wildest dreams of its creators. It relegated 
the founders of the Constitution to the role of doc- 
trinaire theorists, political amateurs. Just be- 
cause it grew up slowly to meet the needs of am- 
bitious politicians and was not imposed by ruling- 
class fiat, as was the Constitution, did it have a 
chance to become assimilated, worked into the po- 
litical intelligence and instinct of the people, and 
be adopted gladly and universally as a genuine 
political form, expressive both of popular need 
and ruling-class demand. It satisfied the popular 
demand for democracy. The enormous sense of 
victory which followed the sweeping away of 
property qualifications of suffrage, the tangible 
evidence that now every citizen was participating 
in public affairs, and that the entire manhood de- 
mocracy was now self-governing, created a mood 
[ 220 ] 



of political complacency that lasted uninterrupt- 
edly into the twentieth century. The party sys- 
tem was thus the means of removing political 
grievance from the greater part of the populace, 
and of giving to the ruling classes the hidden but 
genuine permanence of control which the Consti- 
tution had tried openly to give them. It supple- 
mented and repaired the ineptitudes of the Consti- 
tution. It became the unofficial but real govern- 
ment, the instrument which used the Constitution 
as its instrument. 

Only in two cases did the party system seem to 
lose its grip, was it thrown off its base by the in- 
ception of a new party from without — in the elec- 
tions of Jackson and of Lincoln. Jackson came 
in as the representative of a new democratic West 
which had no tradition of suffrage qualifications, 
and Lincoln as a minority candidate in a time of 
factional and sectional strife. But the discom- 
fiture of the party politicians was short. The 
party system proved perfectly capable of assimilat- 
ing both of these new movements. Jackson's in- 
surrection was soon captured by the old machinery 
and fed the slavocracy, and Lincoln's party be- 
[221] 



came the property of the new bonanza capitalism. 
Neither Jackson or Lincoln made the slightest de- 
flection in the triumphal march of the party-sys- 
tem. In practically no other contests has the elec- 
torate had for all practical purposes a choice ex- 
cept between two candidates, identical as far as 
their political role would be as representatives of 
the significant classes in the State. Campaigns 
such as Bryan's, where one of the parties is cap- 
tured by an element which seeks a real transfer- 
ence of power from the significant to the less sig- 
nificant classes, split the party, and sporadic third 
party attacks merely throw the scale one way or 
the other between the big parties, or, if threaten- 
ing enough, produce a virtual coalition against 
them. 

To most of the Americans of the classes which 
consider themselves significant the war brought a 
sense of the sanctity of the State, which, if they 
had had time to think about it, would have seemed 
a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits 
of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore 
the State in favor of partisan political contro- 
versies, or personal struggles for office, or the pur- 
[222 ] 



suit of party policies. It is the Government 
rather than the State with which the politically 
minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a 
shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness 
only on occasions of patriotic holiday. 

Government is obviously composed of common 
and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate ob- 
ject of criticism and even contempt. If your own 
party is in power, things may be assumed to be 
moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, 
then clearly all safety and honor have fled the 
State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite 
that way. What you think is only that there are 
rascals to be turned out of a very practical ma- 
chinery of offices and functions which you take 
for granted. When we say that Americans are 
lawless, we usually mean that they are less con- 
scious than other peoples of the august majesty 
of the institution of the State as it stands behind 
the objective government of men and laws which 
we see. In a republic the men who hold office are 
indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of 
them possess the slightest personal dignity with 
which they could endow their political role; even 
[223] 



if they ever thought of such a thing. And they 
have no class distinction to give them glamor. In 
a Republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, 
because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to 
gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned demo- 
crat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the 
plainness of a system where every citizen has be- 
come a king. If you are more sophisticated you 
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from 
affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat 
does not in the least treat his elected citizen with 
the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisti- 
cated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when 
he finds it. The republican state has almost no 
trappings to appeal to the common man's emo- 
tions. What it has are of military origin, and in 
an unmilitary era such as we have passed through 
since the Civil War, even military trappings have 
been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of 
the State almost fades out of the consciousness of 
men. 

With the shock of war, however, the State 
comes into its own again. The Government, with 
no mandate from the people, without consultation 
[224] 






of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the 
backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, 
which slowly bring it into collision with some other 
Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the 
country into war. For the benefit of proud and 
haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the 
intolerable insults which have been hurled to- 
wards us by the other nations ; for the benefit of the 
liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of 
moral purposes which our going to war will 
achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, 
it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny 
of the world. The result is that, even in those 
countries where the business of declaring war is 
theoretically in the hands of representatives of 
the people, no legislature has ever been known to 
decline the request of an Executive, which has 
conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and 
irresponsibility, that it order the nation into bat- 
tle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial 
difference between a State in which the popular 
Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State 
in which an absolute monarch or ruling class de- 
clares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, 
[225] 



the difference is not striking. In the f reeest of re- 
publics as well as in the most tyrannical of Em- 
pires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotia- 
tions which produce or forestall war, are equally 
the private property of the Executive part of the 
Government, and are equally exposed to no check 
whatever from popular bodies, or the people vot- 
ing as a mass themselves. 

The moment war is declared, however, the mass 
of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, be- 
come convinced that they have willed and exe- 
cuted the deed themselves. They then with the 
exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow 
themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in 
all the environments of their lives, and turned into 
a solid manufactory of destruction toward what- 
ever other people may have, in the appointed 
scheme of things, come within the range of 
the Government's disapprobation. The citizen 
throws off his contempt and indifference to Gov- 
ernment, identifies himself with its purposes, re- 
vives all his military memories and symbols, and 
the State once more walks, an august presence, 
through the imaginations of men. Patriotism be- 
[226] 



comes the dominant feeling, and produces immedi- 
ately that intense and hopeless confusion between 
the relations which the individual bears and should 
bear towards the society of which he is a part. 

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction be- 
tween State, nation and government. In our 
quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the 
basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose 
population spreading over a certain geographical 
portion of the earth's surface, speaking a com- 
mon language, and living in a homogeneous civi- 
lization. Our idea of Country concerns itself 
with the non-political aspects of a people, its ways 
of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, 
its characteristic attitudes towards life. We are 
Americans because we live in a certain bounded 
territory, because our ancestors have carried on a 
great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, be- 
cause we live in certain kinds of communities 
which have a certain look and express their aspira- 
tions in certain ways. We can see that our civ- 
ilization is different from contiguous civilizations 
like the Indian and Mexican. The institutions of 
our country form a certain network which affects 
[22 7 ] 



us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that 
these other civilizations do not. We are a part 
of country, for better or for worse. We have ar- 
rived in it through the operation of physiological 
laws, and not in any way through our own choice. 
By the time we have reached what are called years 
of discretion, its influences have molded our habits, 
our values, our ways of thinking, so that however 
aware we may become, we never really lose the 
stamp of our civilization, or could be mistaken for 
the child of any other country. Our feeling for 
our fellow-countrymen is one of similarity or of 
mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud 
of and congenial to our particular network of 
civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities 
and rage at its defects. This does not alter the 
fact that we are inextricably bound up in it. The 
Country, as an inescapable group into which we 
are born, and which makes us its particular kind 
of a citizen of the world, seems to be a funda- 
mental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible 
minimum of social feeling. 

Now this feeling for country is essentially non- 
competitive ; we think of our own people merely as 
[228] 



living on the earth's surface along with other 
groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, 
but fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. 
In our simple conception of country there is no 
more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than 
there is in our feeling for our family. Our in- 
terest turns within rather than without, is intensive 
and not belligerent. We grow up and our imag- 
inations gradually stake out the world we live in, 
they need no greater conscious satisfaction for 
their gregarious impulses than this sense of a great 
mass of people to whom we are more or less at- 
tuned, and in whose institutions we are function- 
ing. The feeling for country would be an unin- 
flatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State 
and Government which are associated with it. 
Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of liv- 
ing and letting live. But State is essentially a 
concept of power, of competition; it signifies a 
group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the 
misfortune of being born not only into a country 
but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to 
mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion. 
The State is the country acting as a political 
[229] 



unit, it is the group acting as a repository of force, 
determiner of law, arbiter of justice. Interna- 
tional politics is a "power politics" because it is 
a relation of States and that is what States infal- 
libly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of 
human and industrial force that may be hurled 
against each other in war. When a country acts 
as a whole in relation to another coutnry, or in 
imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coerc- 
ing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is act- 
ing as a State. The history of America as a coun- 
try is quite different from that of America as a 
State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneer- 
ing conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth 
and the ways in which it was used, of the enter- 
prise of education, and the carrying out of spirit- 
ual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. 
But as a State, its history is that of playing a part 
in the world, making war, obstructing interna- 
tional trade, preventing itself from being split to 
pieces, punishing those citizens whom society 
agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay 
for all. . . . 

THE END 

[230] 



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